Beirut, January 27: Middle Eastern governments are failing to improve their human rights records, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday at the release of its World Report 2010 in Beirut.
“The year 2009 was one of the missed opportunities for women and migrants in the region,” the watchdog’s Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson said as the group released its Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen country studies.
“For human rights defenders, their small space for manoeuvring shrank even further,” Whitson said in a statement.
The five chapters largely focus on torture, discrimination against women and minorities and the treatment of foreign workers.
Women in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia continued to face legal discrimination, where they cannot pass citizenship on to their children, the report said.
Saudi Arabia also requires women to secure a male guardian’s permission for travel.
HRW underlined the need for Jordan and Syria to fight a wave of “honour killings,” the murder of women, often by a male relative, on suspicion of a pre-marital or extra-marital relationship.
Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen also continued to repress human rights defenders and journalists, the group said in its 612-page report.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, especially in Lebanon, continued to live in “appalling social and economic conditions and were subject to wide-ranging restrictions on housing and employment,” the report said.
Ethnic Kurds in Syria were “subject to systematic discrimination, including the arbitrary denial of citizenship to an estimated 300,000 born in Syria,” it added.
HRW also highlighted the poor treatment of migrant domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Jordan, where they faced “exploitation and abuse by employers, including excessive work hours, non-payment of wages, and restrictions on their liberty.”
Hundreds of thousands of workers from countries including the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia travel to the Middle East to find employment, mainly as domestic workers.
—Agencies