Written evidence submitted by Human Rights Watch (MENA0037)

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1. Human Rights Watch investigates and reports on abuses happening in all corners of the world. We work to protect the most at risk, from vulnerable minorities and civilians in wartime, to refugees and children in need.

Human Rights Trends in MENA

2. Human rights are trending negatively across the region, with shrinking space for civil society and free speech, the legacy of conflicts for which there has been rampant impunity for serious international crimes, and the entrenchment of authoritarian leaders with strong bilateral relationships with Western powers who are tepid in their promotion of human rights in the region, deprioritizing human rights in furtherance of security, economic, and other national priorities. Following the war in Ukraine, European countries are also prioritizing fulfilling energy needs in engagement with Gulf states and Algeria, to the detriment of rights promotion. Moreover, other Western actors – from global management consultancies to celebrities, athletes, and influencers, and now the professional sports industry of golf – are at the forefront of whitewashing human rights abuses of autocratic governments in the region in exchange for exorbitant payouts, especially from the fossil fuel-rich Gulf states. Gulf dictators’ ability, especially in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to immediately deploy enormous amounts of oil wealth-derived financial capital without institutional constraints is unprecedented, and has likely led to widespread silencing and buying off key political, military, and financial decision-makers and global influencers, trailed by serious, repeated allegations of corruption and influence peddling. At the same time, economic conditions in many countries in the region have deteriorated significantly, with larger numbers of people no longer able to access quality food, water, electricity, healthcare, decent housing, and education, and governments –often entrenched in corruption and suffering from weak judicial institutions–failing to implement necessary reforms and rights respecting social protection schemes. MENA is the most water-scarce region in the world. The International Water Management Institute has warned that climate change will only increase water stress, and analysts have speculated that climate change will increase migration and forced displacement. Marginalized communities have, as ever, often been most susceptible to these negative trends. A final important trend is transnational repression – the appetite and ability of MENA governments to go beyond their borders to threaten and target dissidents abroad with surveillance, harassment, intimidation, abduction, and even assassination.

Questions

1. What are the key challenges facing MENA countries and what implications do these have for UK foreign policy?
1. Building Institutions for Rights Protection and Accountability: There is shrinking space for civil society and free speech across the region and entrenched and growing authoritarianism. Many authoritarian leaders have strong bilateral relationships with Western powers who are deprioritizing human rights in furtherance of security, economic, and other national priorities. At the same time, MENA continues to be plagued by the absence of the independent, transparent institutions needed to promote rights compliance and impunity for rights abuse. In its foreign and development policy with countries in the region, the UK should work to advance and promote efforts to protect civic space and to build the transparent, accountable, and independent institutions needed to protect and promote rights.
2. Protecting Workers, Demanding Corporate Accountability, and Promoting Transparent Use of Public Funds for Socio-Economic Rights: The UK should use its influence with MENA governments to ensure they are operating effectively to deliver economic, social, and cultural rights. This should include ensuring that donor support is not misallocated or distributed in a discriminatory way. The UK should also encourage MENA states to replace regressive subsidy systems with progressive taxation, robust public services, and universal social security systems. The UK should reform its Seasonal Workers Visa scheme in consultation with worker rights organizations in the UK and also be an advocate for ending the abusive kafala, or sponsorship system, and propose rights-respecting and implementable labor policy alternatives that protect the fundamental rights of migrant workers across the region. The UK should also work to ensure that UK corporations and private actors end their complicity in governments’ human rights abuses and comply with their human rights responsibilities. Increasingly, states in the Gulf are using their wealth to launder their reputations and buy influence. The UK should not finalize a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries until the agreement includes concrete labor and other rights improvements, particularly for migrant workers, including in the UK. The UK should incorporate strong human rights conditions in any future FTA and not conclude the deal until there is detailed public transparency around the rights protections in it. The agreement should also contain enforceable human rights obligations for businesses and investors; and should not include investor-state dispute settlement clauses. The UK should examine what human rights standards should apply to the acquisitions by sovereign wealth funds of major UK businesses, such as Newcastle United.
3. Dismantling Structural Discrimination, Advancing Equality, and Protecting Marginalized Groups: In law and in practice, women, LGBT individuals, marginalized religious and ethnic groups, and people with disabilities are discriminated against systemically across the MENA region. Using its role in multilateral institutions and bilateral diplomacy, the UK should encourage the development of new laws, policies, and practices that protect these increasingly marginalized people. Priority areas of concern include, for example, unlawful restrictions of women’s mobility and travel across the region (including those stemming from male guardianship), discrimination of the Bahai community in Iran amounting to the crime of persecution against this religious group, the online targeting of LGBT individuals by governments, and the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution being perpetrated by Israel officials against millions of Palestinians.
4. Phasing Out Fossil Fuels, Protecting Vulnerable Populations, and Advocating for Environmental Activists: The MENA region is home to petrostates with deeply repressive governments who use their countries’ vast fossil fuel industries to finance their governments’ repression. Despite a growing consensus, including from the International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that there cannot be new oil, gas, or coal development if governments are to meet global climate targets and protect human rights, these governments are expanding fossil fuel production. The UK government should encourage MENA states to phase out fossil fuels and end fossil fuel subsidies. In eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, especially consumer subsidies, MENA states should reinvest savings to advance the realization of people’s socioeconomic rights, rather than allow their erosion that may result from increased energy costs. It should ensure all people have access to reliable, sufficient, affordable, clean, and renewable energy and fund programs that advance people’s rights, such as universal social security systems that provide all people with support and key moments in their life course. The UK should lead by example by halting all new fossil fuel projects, phasing out the use of fossil fuels and protecting civic space and the rights of environmental and climate defenders and advocate for others to do the same.
5. Norm Building, Accountability, and Human Rights Protection in Conflict and Post-Conflict Situations: While many countries in the region are transitioning from active armed conflicts to post conflict situations the deadly legacy of these conflicts persists. The UK should:
1. Provide national judicial officials with support to investigate and prosecute, where there is evidence to do so, those who are credibly implicated in serious crimes under the principle of universal jurisdiction, in accordance with domestic laws;
2. Champion accountability initiatives in multilateral institutions, including at the UN Human Rights Council;
3. Encourage and support the development of institutions, laws, and policies to protect civilians and to create momentum to hold individuals responsible for serious crimes accountable in fair and impartial proceedings;
4. Advocate for an end to unlawful interference with humanitarian operations and human rights abuses in aid delivery aid;
5. Press for human rights to center in reconstruction, reconciliation, and transition plans and policies, including by advocating for victim compensation, housing, land and property (HLP) rights, clearance of explosive remnants of war and rehabilitation of critical infrastructure, victim centered policies related to the disappeared and mass graves, and a safe and dignified return of refugees and displaced persons complemented by sustained reintegration support; and
6. Scrupulously respect and maintain the principle of nonrefoulement as states transition from conflict to post-conflict situations, especially bearing in mind that in countries like Syria, the authorities who have prevailed may well harbor hostility toward those who fled, that widespread fear of persecution persists after bullets and bombs have stopped flying, and that damaged and destroyed infrastructure, food insecurity, and ruined economies can make post-conflict refugee return unreasonable and unsustainable for all but exceptional cases.

Finally, the UK should end arms sales and security assistance to MENA governments who systematically abuse rights, and robustly assess any licensing of arms sales against the Strategic Export Licensing Criteria and any proposed or ongoing assistance or cooperation against the Overseas Justice and Security Guidance.

2. What are the main countries in which the UK should focus its efforts within the region?
1. GCC, especially Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Bahrain: Negotiations for a free trade agreement between the UK and the GCC, a political and economic coordination body made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have continued throughout 2023. The UK has released very little information on the timeline and substance of the talks and has not publicly pledged to include detailed rights protections for countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE that have dismal rights records, particularly in regard to migrant workers. Failure to ensure concrete improvements on human rights, particularly labor rights, before an FTA is signed could lead to UK complicity in rights abuses in the GCC countries and beyond. Before an agreement is signed, the UK government should ensure that the agreement requires all parties, including the UK itself, to address human rights abuses and make improvements, with concrete benchmarks, particularly for labor rights, freedom of association, and other rights that relate to the ability of workers to advocate for improvements to their conditions. Systemic labor violations are effectively state policy in the Gulf countries and are deeply entrenched within the economies of the region. The increased trade promised by an FTA could facilitate the abuses even further. The UK should also investigate and regulate sovereign wealth funds like Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) that have been linked to human rights abuses. The UK should develop regulation that reviews and addresses the human rights risks of foreign investments from sovereign wealth funds, like the PIF, in UK companies or operations. Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has consolidated vast economic power in Saudi Arabia via the PIF. The PIF has facilitated human rights abuses and has benefitted from human rights abuses. This raises serious concerns for UK businesses engaging with the PIF, and any possible links this may create between them and abuses in Saudi Arabia and abroad, particularly as the fund expands its investments in key sectors of the UK economy, including technology, sports, entertainment, and finance. The UK should also meaningfully assess the human rights risks associated with its assistance to Bahrain’s Gulf Strategy Fund before continuing funding. The UK government’s contributions to the fund provide support to Bahrain’s Ministry of Interior and its Ombudsman office, the Prisoner and Detainees Rights Commission, the Special Investigations Unit, and the National Intelligence Agency Ombudsman, which are all involved in serious human rights violations in Bahrain. In advance of the COP 28 Climate Conference in the UAE, the UK government should also take every opportunity, in public comments and private meetings, to press Emirati authorities to end their persecution of rights defenders and peaceful dissidents and free them, starting with detained Emirati human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor. The UK government should also push for the equitable and rights-respecting phase out of all fossil fuels in the COP28 conclusions.
2. Egypt: The ongoing human rights crisis in Egypt and the deteriorating economic situation in recent years exemplify why good governance, human rights and the rule of law are interlinked and indispensable for long term political stability and economic development, and that focusing on short-term political stability is usually counterproductive and, in many ways, fuels the very root causes for the economic and political crises. In the name of security and stability, the government of President al-Sisi has been relentlessly targeting pro-democracy and human rights activists and has showed zero tolerance to independent organization. In the face of this sustained crackdown, the UK has failed to exert its leverage bilaterally and in multi-lateral fora to ensure that there are concrete consequences for such relentless repression, instead prioritizing trade and security cooperation. At the same time, however, al-Sisi has failed to provide prosperity or economic growth and poverty under his rule has only increased, even according to official figures. The UK government should strategically prioritize defending democracy and human rights as the main tool towards achieving long term stability. This includes halting all security and military assistance and weapons transfers to the Egyptian government and conditioning their resumption on an end to grave human rights abuses and transparent investigations of serious crimes. The UK should work with likeminded states to expose the human rights crisis in Egypt through UN mechanisms, including at the Human Rights Council. It should leverage its influence to secure the release of political prisoners, including UK citizen Alaa Abdelfattah.
3. Iran: The UK government should ensure that human rights are at the center of its engagement with Iran. One year after the “woman, life, freedom” movement, the Iranian government has escalated its crackdown against peaceful dissidents. The UK government should support relocation and safe passage of protestors, human rights defenders and activists who face serious threat of persecution and imprisonment in Iran. As the Iranian government continues to heavily restrict access to the internet and messaging apps, the UK government should also support efforts to preserve internet access, including through pressing technology companies to ensure Iranians have safe access to secure, uncensored communication technologies. The UK should also seek to broaden multilateral pressure on Iranian authorities and support multilateral efforts to lay the foundation for accountability for serious abuses, including by supporting the renewal of the mandate of the UN Fact Finding Mission and the Special Rapporteur at the UN Human Rights Council.
4. Israel/Palestine [updated 3 November 2023]: In response to the recent hostilities in Israel, the UK government rightly condemned Hamas’ deliberate killings of civilians and taking of hostages that, among other acts, amount to war crimes. The UK government has stated that it supports “Israel’s right to defend itself in line with international law,” that Israel’s operations must minimise civilian casualties and that Israel must work to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza. However, the UK should be clear that Israel’s decision to cut electricity, water, fuel and food in and into Gaza constitutes collective punishment of the civilian population and is a war crime. International humanitarian law requires Israel, as the occupying power in Gaza, to ensure that the basic needs of the civilian population are provided for, and must facilitate, not block, the delivery of humanitarian aid.

All parties to the conflict should respect international humanitarian law, including the rule that parties to a conflict must distinguish at all times between combatants and civilians. Attacks that target civilians or fail to discriminate between combatants and civilians, or that would be expected to cause disproportionate harm to civilians compared to the anticipated military gain, are prohibited. Since October 7, Palestinian armed groups in Gaza have indiscriminately fired thousands of rockets at Israeli cities and towns, which amount to war crimes. Israel’s use of explosive weapons with wide effects in densely populated areas of Gaza causes foreseeable harm to civilians and raises the risk of unlawful indiscriminate attacks. These attacks have reduced to rubble entire city blocks and large parts of neighborhoods. We have documented Israel’s unlawfully indiscriminate use of white phosphorus in civilian areas in Gaza, in violation of international humanitarian law. The UK should call out grave abuses, irrespective of the warring party responsible.

The current hostilities have featured a flagrant disregard for international law and are rooted in decades of impunity for serious crimes. Israel’s systematic oppression of the population of Gaza, including its 16-year closure of the Gaza Strip and now the blockade of the enclave, is part of its ongoing crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians.

The UK government should:

1. Continue to press Israel to allow unhindered humanitarian aid into Gaza including food, water, fuel and medical supplies, and press the Israeli authorities to immediately restore electricity and water to Gaza.
2. Continue to call on Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups to safely, immediately and unconditionally release all civilians taken hostage.
3. Call on all parties to respect international humanitarian law; they should avoid the use of explosive weapons that have a wide blast or fragmentation radius or are too inaccurate to be anything but indiscriminate when used in populated areas.
4. Comply with its obligations under the UK's Strategic Export Licensing Criteria and the Arms Trade Treaty. Do not become complicit in grave abuses, including through the sale or transfer of arms.
5. Press Egypt and Israel to permit civilians to pass through their respective crossings to seek life-saving medical care.
6. Integrate a framework of atrocity prevention into its response strategy to ensure mass atrocity prevention considerations are centered in its response.
7. Highlight the importance of accountability by all parties, including at the International Criminal Court. These events highlight the urgent need for justice and for the ICC Office of the Prosecutor to accelerate its investigation into serious crimes committed by all parties in and from Palestine, which is party to the ICC’s Rome Statute.
8. Press Israel to end its unlawful 16-year closure of Gaza and its crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians.

Beyond the current hostilities, at a time of unprecedented repression of Palestinians and as more and more voices speak out about Israel’s systemic discrimination and apartheid, the UK government should adopt a new approach rooted in human rights, international law, and recognition of the reality on the ground. A peace process of over 30 years cannot be used as a reason not to acknowledge the reality of decades-long entrenched Israeli discriminatory repression of Palestinians. While the UK has urged Israel to cease settlement expansion, which it rightfully deems unlawful, it has failed to act in line with this policy and press to end serious abuses and ensure accountability for them. The government, for example, recently signed a 2030 Roadmap for UK-Israel bilateral relations which, under the guise of combatting antisemitism, states that it will continue to discourage the focus on Israel at the UN Human Rights Council and other international bodies, disagrees with the use of the term ‘apartheid’ with regard to Israel, opposes the International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s prolonged occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and re-commits itself to introducing anti-boycott laws. The Roadmap fails to condemn settlements and the systemic discrimination and plethora of other serious rights abuses against Palestinians. The UK should highlight Israel’s entrenched structural repression of Palestinians and recognise that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of persecution and apartheid against Palestinians. It should revoke the 2030 roadmap for UK-Israel bilateral relations and ensure cooperation with Israel is consistent with international law and human rights. It should urge Israeli authorities to reverse the decision to outlaw six prominent Palestinian civil society organisations and to end the generalised ban on travel to and from Gaza and permit free movement of people and goods into and out of Gaza, subject to, at most, individual security screenings. It should also urge the Palestinian Authority to end its systematic practice of arbitrarily arresting and torturing critics and opponents. It should also publicly support efforts to end complicity in and ensure accountability for serious crimes in Israel and Palestine, including at the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. 

5. Libya: The UK can advance accountability and civilian protection objectives in Libya, in several multilateral fora. The UN Security Council, since 2011, established a robust sanctions program and an arms embargo, and has referred Libya to the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor. The UK should press Libyan authorities to surrender to The Hague individuals against whom the ICC issued arrest warrants and whose location is known to them, including Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. The UK should also consider individual targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, on those found responsible for ongoing violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including entities and individuals named in the Sanctions Committee’s panel of experts on Libya. The UK government should support the Working Group on International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights of the International Follow-Up Committee on Libya of the first Berlin Conference in 2020, to ensure follow up to the pledges by conference participants and implementation of conference conclusions including to prioritize justice and accountability. It should press Libyan authorities to ensure they commit to due process, ending arbitrary detention and promoting accountability for serious violations, and so that they work toward implementing recommendations made by the UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya (FFM) who in their final March 2023 report documented sweeping abuses including “repression of civic groups, arbitrary detention, murder, rape, enslavement, extrajudicial killing and enforced disappearance.” The UK should ensure that Libya remains under the Human Rights Council’s scrutiny by requesting the High Commissioner for Human Rights to present oral and written updates on progress of implementation of the recommendations of the FFM and should press Libya to accept the pending requests by at least nine UN experts, to conduct country visits to Libya
6. Yemen: Despite copious evidence of Saudi-led coalition attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, as well as the use of UK weapons in many of these attacks, the UK government has continued to grant licenses for the export of arms to Saudi Arabia. The UK should immediately stop issuing new licenses for arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Further, the UK has not utilized their position on the UN Security Council to push for accountability or justice for the harms civilians have suffered, and Ambassador Woodward’s recent statement at the Security Council made no mention of the word accountability. The UK should apply the same standards for accountability and rule of law that they have used in response to Russia’s violations in Ukraine, and push for accountability for violations in Yemen.

October 2023