DOHA: Qatar’s national human rights watchdog has said it has come to the rescue of a foreign worker who was not allowed to travel overseas as his sponsor demanded QR40,000 to issue him an exit permit (a sponsor’s formal permission required by a foreign worker to travel abroad).
The chairman of the National Human Rights Committee (NHRC) cited the above example in a lecture he delivered earlier this week to highlight what he said was the lopsidedness of the sponsorship law.
“We need to strike a balance between the rights of foreign workers and those of their sponsors,” said Dr Ali Semaikh Al Marri, criticising the existing sponsorship rules.
The lecture was held at Qatar University’s College of Education on “Human Rights issues in Qatar”. Talking about human trafficking, Al Marri said that there might be some cases of trafficking due to the alleged sale of ‘free visas’ and there might also be some cases of ill-treatment of workers. Such cases fall within the purview of the National Committee for Combating Human Trafficking which is an independent body, he said.
There are 1.8 million people in the country and imagine that a vast majority of them — 1.4 million — are foreign workers, said the NHRC chairman, hinting that he did not rule out the possibility of a few cases of human trafficking or ill-treatment of workers taking place here and there.
Al Marri, talking about the exit permit rule, said that the case that involved a Qatari sponsor demanding QR40,000 from his foreign worker was a rare thing to happen. “Such things happen in a few cases.”
The NHRC chairman said that a committee has been set up by the State Cabinet to study the sponsorship law to make it balanced — a legislation that would do justice to both the employers and their foreign employees.
Al Marri pointed out that since most of the complaints the Committee gets relate to issues that fall within the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Interior, the latter has set up a human rights department of its own. The chairman reiterated that the plight of children of Qatari women married to foreigners was at the heart of the NHRC and recently a draft of a legislation had been prepared by it, which, if implemented, would confer equal rights on them, or, in other words, they would be treated as Qatari citizens.
The Peninsula
