Background

In November, a constitutional referendum to amend several provisions resulted in an article amendment rescinding people’s right to elect members of the Shura Council (Consultative Council).

Migrant workers’ rights

Migrant workers continued to face serious abuses, including wage theft, restrictions on changing jobs and inadequate grievance and redress mechanisms.

Seventeen men from East Africa who paid exorbitant recruitment fees to secure jobs in Qatar were abandoned by their sponsors upon arrival in Qatar, leaving them without food, money or Qatari identity documents. After several months, they were admitted to a government-run shelter, where their passports were confiscated, they were questioned about their connections to various organizations, and their freedom of movement was severely restricted. They were eventually permitted to return to their home country but received no compensation for the abuses they had suffered.

Migrant domestic workers continued to face harsh working conditions. In June, Qatar’s Shura Council proposed requiring domestic workers to obtain their employer’s permission before leaving Qatar, effectively reinstating exit permits which were abolished in 2020. The proposal included penalties for workers reported as “absconding” and those sheltering them. If adopted, this would further endanger domestic workers in vulnerable situations.

The authorities failed to adequately protect workers from extreme heat. The Ministry of Labour reported more than 350 violations of the midday outdoor work ban between 1 June and 15 September but provided no details of the penalties.

Right to remedy

Qatar and FIFA failed to ensure long-overdue remedy, including compensation, for the vast numbers of workers whose rights were abused for a decade while working on projects related to FIFA’s 2022 men’s football World Cup.

An independent review, recognizing FIFA’s responsibility to remedy a significant range of abuses endured by hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Qatar, was approved by FIFA’s council in March but was not published until November. Its key recommendation to compensate victims was rejected by FIFA.¹ A few days earlier, FIFA had announced that, in partnership with Qatar, it was launching a USD 50 million “Legacy Fund” for the 2022 World Cup. The fund includes contributions to the WHO, the World Trade Organization and UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, but excludes any compensation for affected workers.²

The Qatari authorities continued to fail to investigate effectively the deaths of migrant workers and to hold employers or authorities accountable, preventing any assessment of whether the deaths were work-related and depriving families of the opportunity to receive compensation.

Freedom of expression, association and assembly

The authorities continued to curtail the right to freedom of expression, including by arbitrarily detaining individuals who spoke out for greater rights and freedoms.

In July the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) called for Abdullah Ibhais, a former media manager for Qatar’s 2022 World Cup, to be immediately released and compensated. He was arrested in 2019 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on trumped-up bribery charges after he raised concerns about migrant workers’ conditions on World Cup construction sites. WGAD found his trial to be grossly unfair, citing coerced “confessions” and denial of legal assistance; findings to which the authorities failed to respond.³

In December, activists reported that a Qatari lawyer who had been serving a life sentence since 2022 was released. His brother, who is also a lawyer, remained in arbitrary detention serving a life sentence following his 2022 conviction on charges related to contesting laws ratified by the emir and organizing unauthorized public meetings.

Women’s and girls’ rights

Women continued to face discrimination in law and practice. Under the guardianship system, women needed a male guardian’s permission to marry, study abroad on government scholarships, work in many government jobs, travel abroad if aged under 25, and access reproductive healthcare.

Women remained inadequately protected in law against domestic violence.

LGBTI people’s rights

Legislation continued to discriminate against LGBTI people. Authorities detained individuals for their sexual orientation or gender expression.

In February, plain-clothes security forces arrested Manuel Guerrero Aviña, a British-Mexican national, shortly after he agreed to meet another man through the LGBTI dating app Grindr. His family believed he was entrapped by law enforcement officials. Authorities detained him without charge for more than six weeks, interrogated him without a lawyer and forced him to thumbprint a so-called “confession” in Arabic, which he did not understand. The authorities subsequently charged him with drug-related offences and sentenced him to a six-month suspended prison term.⁴ He returned to the UK in June after receiving a deportation order.

Right to a healthy environment

In January, Qatar announced its Third National Development Strategy, which included a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% “relative to the business-as-usual scenario by 2030”. However, in February, Qatar announced plans to expand its liquefied natural gas production by 85%.

Qatar joined other higher-income countries during COP29 to mobilize USD 300 billion annually by 2035 to help lower-income countries address climate change.

1. “Global: FIFA must publish its review into compensation for workers harmed delivering the World Cup in Qatar”, 9 May ↩︎
2. “Qatar: FIFA’s Qatar World Cup Legacy Fund ignores exploited workers”, 27 November ↩︎
3. “UN body calls for release of Qatar whistleblower”, 24 July ↩︎
4. “Qatar: Quash conviction of British-Mexican national sentenced to six-month suspended prison term in grossly unfair trial”, 5 June ↩︎