I searched the PHP manual and StackOverflow too, but haven\'t really found a proper answer to my question. My dates are stored in UTC. Now if I do:
$date = n
Your assumption is correct.
In addition, this would have taken you 10 seconds to verify yourself.
Edit:
The correct syntax is:
$date = new DateTime('2012-03-16 14:00:00', new DateTimeZone('UTC'));
As to your second question. The timezone passed in the DateTime constructor is the 'reference' timezone.
You should still call ->setTimeZone(new DateTimeZone('UTC')) to format it in the UTC timezone, unless the default timezone was also set to UTC (date_default_timezone_set).
Next time, try a little harder trying stuff out before asking.