“They showed me a photocopied piece of paper that read: ‘Since the election, some people want to create chaos and unrest. It is asked that quick action is taken… to identify the organizers and the collaborators.’ It was pretty strange for me. I asked, ‘How is this related to me?’ They explained it was a general warrant. Then they brought me to the car.”

Shiva Nazar Ahari, an Iranian human rights defender arrested on 14 June, describing her arrest by Intelligence Ministry officials.

The year opened with Israeli military jets pounding Gaza , as part of a 22-day conflict that killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians, and closed with mounting repression in Iran , as thousands of demonstrators again took to the streets to protest over the disputed outcome of the presidential election and the ruthless clampdown on dissent that followed.

Both cases, in their different ways, illustrated the need for accountability if long-standing cycles of human rights abuse are to be brought to an end. Both also illustrate the obstacles to achieving such accountability. Following the Gaza conflict, an authoritative UN investigation found that the parties to the conflict, Israel and Hamas, had committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity and called for them to hold credible investigations and bring the perpetrators to account, yet neither had taken effective steps to do this by the end of the year.

The Iranian authorities, meanwhile, seemed more intent on covering up than investigating allegations of rape and other torture of detainees. They also sought to transfer the blame for killings committed by their forces onto those who spoke out against them, rather than comply with their obligations under international law to properly investigate human rights violations and hold those responsible to account. As the architects of the abuse, they had much to hide.

The events in Gaza and Iran were also both illustrations – in the starkest form – of the continuing insecurity faced by millions throughout the Middle East and North Africa region. As in previous years, 2009 witnessed deep-seated political, religious and ethnic divisions spawning patterns of intolerance, injustice and violent conflict, in which those who speak up for human rights or call for reform all too often do so at their peril. These divisions and tensions were also exacerbated in 2009 by foreign involvement in the region – particularly the presence of foreign military forces – and by the impact of the global financial crisis.

Conflict and insecurity

The short, sharp conflict in Gaza and southern Israel at the beginning of the year was marked on both sides by a callous disregard for the lives of civilians who consequently comprised the vast majority of those killed and injured.

Likewise, it was civilians, people trying to go about their daily lives amid the turmoil around them, who bore the brunt of the internal conflict that continued to grip much of Iraq . Overall, the number of those killed there fell in 2009 compared to previous years; even so, numerous civilians were killed. Many died in bomb explosions in Baghdad and other cities, perpetrated by shadowy armed groups who often seemed to select their targets with the aim of killing and maiming as many civilians as possible, and provoking sectarian feuds. Others were abducted and murdered by armed militias connected to parties represented in the Iraqi parliament.

"In all too many states, those who had the courage or temerity to question government policies or criticize their human rights records were still liable to find themselves branded as enemies of the state."

Meanwhile, the Yemen government increasingly resorted to repressive methods to try and contain growing unrest and protests in the south against alleged discrimination amid the country's burgeoning economic woes.

Attacks by armed groups, including groups apparently aligned to al-Qa'ida, killed civilians in states such as Algeria and Egypt . Such attacks, and the waves of arrests of suspects that usually followed, added to the general climate of insecurity in the region. They also pointed to a propensity by governments to resort to repression and abuse of human rights in response to opposition, including peaceful opposition, rather than address underlying political, economic or social grievances.

Repression of dissent

If these were the most extreme manifestations, the political insecurity that pervades the region was evidenced also by a pattern of governmental intolerance of even peaceful criticism and dissent.

In states such as Libya , Saudi Arabia and Syria , authoritarian governments allowed virtually no space for free speech or independent political activity. In Libya , there was some slight opening up and Amnesty International was permitted to visit for the first time in five years, but rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly all continued to be severely curtailed.

In Egypt, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood – all civilians – sentenced to imprisonment after an unfair trial before a military court in 2008 had their sentences confirmed and members and supporters of the organization, officially banned but commanding wide support, continued to be harassed and detained. In the West Bank, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority cracked down on supporters of Hamas; in Gaza , the de facto Hamas administration targeted supporters of Fatah – in both areas, detainees were tortured or otherwise ill-treated and bystanders were killed and injured in gunfights between opposing factions.

The Moroccan authorities, meanwhile, were increasingly intolerant of those advocating independence for Western Sahara, administered by Morocco since 1975, and of Sahrawi human rights defenders. In November, they summarily expelled Aminatou Haidar to the Canary Islands , claiming that she had renounced her nationality, only relenting and allowing her to return home to Laayoune in the face of mounting international pressure after she had been on hunger strike for a month and had put her life at risk in defence of her human rights.

In all too many states, those who had the courage or temerity to question government policies or criticize their human rights records were still liable to find themselves branded as enemies of the state and detained or sentenced to prison terms.

In Syria , human rights lawyer Muhannad al-Hassani was arrested in July and faced a possible 15-year prison term for exposing the deficiencies of a notorious special court used to try political suspects. He was banned from practising as a lawyer by the official Bar Association. Veteran political activist and lawyer Haytham al-Maleh, despite being 78 years old, likewise faced a possible 15-year sentence for comments he made in a TV interview.

Some even paid with their lives: in Libya , Fathi el-Jahmi, a long-standing government critic, was flown to Jordan for belated medical treatment after over five years of detention when it became clear that his death was imminent; he died some two weeks later.

Freedom of expression and the media

"Torture and other ill-treatment remained endemic and, for the most part, were committed with impunity."

In Tunisia , the authorities used trumped-up charges to prosecute some of their critics while at the same time manipulating the media to smear and defame others. The law acted as no protection for those targeted. After the main journalists' union in the country called for greater media freedom, its leadership was ousted and replaced by a new board that then came out openly advocating the President's re-election for an unprecedented fifth term. Human rights defenders too remained subject to continuing harassment, oppressive surveillance and other breaches of their rights by the Tunisian authorities despite the human rights-friendly image that the government sought to cultivate internationally.

Public ‘security'

In Egypt and Syria , the authorities maintained decades-long states of emergency which equipped their security police with exceptional powers to arrest and detain suspects, to hold them incommunicado and under conditions which facilitated torture and other ill-treatment and abuse. Israel continued to operate a system of military law over the Palestinians in the West Bank, while Palestinians in Gaza were subjected to Israeli laws that afforded them even fewer rights.

Throughout the region, governments allowed their security forces exceptional licence in the name of upholding state security and defending against threats to the public, although often such forces were used to pursue partisan political interests and to maintain monopolies on power in the face of calls for greater openness, free elections and political change.

Consequently, torture and other ill-treatment remained endemic and, for the most part, were committed with impunity. It was common practice throughout the region for political suspects to be detained incommunicado, often for weeks or months at a time, in secret or undisclosed prisons where they were tortured and abused to make them “confess”, to name and so put at risk others with whom they were associated, to make them become informers or simply to terrorize them. Many such detainees were then brought to trial, often before special courts whose procedures ran counter to those prescribed under international fair trial standards, routinely ignoring their complaints of torture and convicting them on the basis of their forced ‘confessions'.

In Iran, the authorities mounted a series of “show trials” reminiscent of those associated with some of the most totalitarian regimes of the 20th century to punish those accused of leading the outburst of popular protest that greeted the official result of the presidential election. In Saudi Arabia, the government announced that more than 300 people had been sentenced on terrorism-related charges but disclosed no details of the trials, which were held in secret, closed to outside observers and, it appeared, even to defence lawyers. One death sentence was said to have been imposed; other defendants received prison terms of up to 30 years.

Several governments in the region continued to use the death penalty extensively, justifying the practice on the grounds both that it was required by Shari'a law and that it deterred crime and guaranteed public security; in a number of other states, the authorities did not carry out executions. The main offenders were Iran , Iraq and Saudi Arabia , in all of which large numbers of executions were carried out, often after legal proceedings that failed to comply with international standards of fair trial. In Iran , moreover, the victims included juvenile offenders sentenced for crimes committed when they were younger than 18. By contrast, the authorities in states such as Algeria , Lebanon , Morocco and Tunisia , while they continued to impose death sentences, maintained de facto moratoriums under which no executions have been carried out in recent years, reflecting the growing international trend towards ending executions.

Economic concerns – housing and livelihoods

Despite efforts by the new US administration to build momentum for a revived Middle East peace process, the divide between Israelis and Palestinians was further deepened in 2009 – not only by the deaths and destruction caused during Operation “Cast Lead” but also by the impact of Israel 's unremitting blockade of the Gaza Strip. Begun in June 2007, the blockade continued to cut off almost 1.5 million Palestinians from the rest of the world, isolating them in Gaza 's cramped confines, and greatly limiting the import of essential goods and supplies. This gratuitous exacerbation of the privations already suffered by the inhabitants of Gaza seriously hampered their access to health care and education and destroyed industries and livelihoods. Imposed ostensibly to deter rocket-firing into Israel by Palestinian armed groups, the blockade was nothing less than an outrage – the imposition of collective punishment on the entire population of Gaza . All too predictably, it hit hardest on the most vulnerable – children, the elderly, the homeless and the sick, including those in need of medical treatment outside Gaza – not the armed militants responsible for rocket firing.

The Gaza blockade and Israeli policies in the West Bank – including house demolitions, roadblocks and restrictions on movement – all contributed to the impoverishment of Palestinians as if by design. Elsewhere in the region, millions of people lived in informal settlements – slums – in various degrees of poverty. In Greater Cairo, for example, many resided in areas that the Egyptian authorities designated as “unsafe” due to the constant threat of sudden rock falls or the presence of high-voltage cables. The residents were liable to be forcibly evicted without any or adequate consultation. Others, re-housed after a lethal rockslide in 2008 which left more than 100 dead, complained that they had no security of tenure in their new abodes.

"Women and girls continued to face legal and other discrimination and to be denied the opportunity to access their rights."

Across the region, women and girls continued to face legal and other discrimination and to be denied the opportunity to access their rights such as to education, health and political participation. In most countries, family and personal status laws rendered women legally inferior to men in relation to inheritance, divorce and custody over their children, and caused them to be inadequately protected against violence within the family or on account of their gender. States such as Iraq, Jordan and Syria retained laws which allow men who commit violence against women to escape punishment if their crimes are deemed to be committed “in a fit of rage” and to uphold family “honour” or to receive only minimal punishment; in Syria, it represented an advance when the President decreed in July that men who killed or injured women relatives on such grounds should receive a penalty of at least two years in prison.

So-called honour killings of women were reported in Jordan , the Palestinian Authority and Syria . In Iraq , women were attacked and threatened for not adhering to strict moral codes and women detainees told a parliamentary committee that they had been raped in detention. In Iran , the authorities continued to target women human rights defenders and activists leading the popular campaign for an end to discrimination against women in law.

Some advances were made in 2009, however. In Kuwait , four women were directly elected to parliament for the first time, after women were given the right to vote and run for office in 2005. In Saudi Arabia , the first woman government minister was appointed – for women's education. In Yemen, the law was changed to allow Yemeni women with foreign husbands to pass on their nationality to their children, but a proposal to raise the marriage age for girls was left pending, although early and forced marriages of girls reportedly remain common and may contribute to Yemen's notably high rate of maternal mortality. Qatar acceded to the UN Women's Convention in June but with reservations, while the governments of Algeria and Jordan lifted some of their previous reservations to the treaty but maintained others and therefore continue to undermine the essence of the Convention as a means of ending gender discrimination.

In the oil- and gas-rich states of the Gulf, it was migrant workers – mostly from Asia – whose labour underpinned the national economies and helped build the world's tallest skyscraper, opened amid great fanfare in December in Dubai . They did the heavy lifting but when it came to human rights, they were near the bottom of the heap: abused, exploited and often required to live in squalid conditions out of sight of the opulence. At the very bottom, both in the Gulf and in countries such as Lebanon , were the migrant domestic workers, almost all of them women. They were generally excluded even from the weak labour law protections that existed for migrants working in construction and other industry. They were among the most vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, triply discriminated against as foreigners, as unprotected workers and as women.

Throughout the region, the situation of foreign migrants gave serious cause for concern. Thousands of suspected irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa seeking to obtain work or travel on to Europe were detained in Algeria , Libya and other states or summarily expelled; some were reported to have been beaten or otherwise abused. Egyptian security forces shot dead at least 19 migrants trying to cross into Israel and forcibly returned 64 to Eritrea despite the risks to their human rights that they faced there. The Algerian government made “illicit” exit from the country, by its own nationals as well as foreigners, a crime. A draft law before the Israeli parliament prescribed a range of prison sentences to be imposed on foreigners who entered Israel illegally, with the heaviest sentences reserved for particular nationalities. 

"All across the region, state authorities have shown themselves either reluctant or downright unwilling to honour their international treaty obligations to protect and promote human rights."

Women, migrants, refugees: these were not alone in suffering discrimination and violence in 2009. In Iran , Iraq and other states, members of ethnic and religious minorities were subject to discrimination and violent attacks. In Syria , thousands of Kurds were effectively stateless and Kurdish minority activists were detained and imprisoned. In Qatar , members of a tribe blamed for a failed coup attempt in 1996 continued to be denied nationality, and so denied employment and other rights. Other minorities facing discrimination included the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. In Egypt , for example, suspected gay men were targeted for prosecution under a debauchery law and subjected to degrading treatment; and in Iraq , gay men were abducted, tortured, murdered and mutilated by Islamist militias, with those responsible not held to account.

Accounting for the past

2009 saw little progress towards addressing past human rights violations despite the continuing, valiant efforts of many survivors and victims' families to learn the truth of what occurred and to seek justice. The Algerian government appeared ever more determined to blot out the enforced disappearances and killings of the 1990s from public memory, and the Syrian government showed no interest in clarifying the fate of those who disappeared under the rule of the current President's father. In Lebanon , human rights groups won a court order for the findings of an earlier official investigation into enforced disappearances to be disclosed but there was little sign that the government, a balancing act of different factions, was willing to pursue the truth with vigour. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon was established in the Netherlands with a mandate to prosecute the perpetrators of one set of political crimes – the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri and related attacks – but was not complemented by measures to investigate many others. In Morocco/Western Sahara, legal and institutional reforms recommended years earlier by the groundbreaking Equity and Reconciliation Commission had yet to be implemented and still no steps had been taken to bring justice to those whose rights were violated under the rule of King Hassan II, when state violence against dissidents and opponents was particularly extreme.

In Iraq , those accused of committing crimes under Saddam Hussain continued to be brought to trial but before a seriously flawed court which handed out further death sentences. In Libya , relatives of prisoners killed at Abu Salim prison in 1996 still awaited the outcome of a belated – and apparently secret – official inquiry.

Conclusion

Ten years on from the start of a new millennium, much – so much – remains to be done to give reality to the human rights set out more than 60 years earlier in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.