Migrants drowning at sea after being turned away from shore. Children detained with adults and at risk of physical and sexual abuse. Workers cheated out of wages and confined to their workplace. Authorities extorting bribes. Governments denying health care benefits to those who might most need it.

Many governments’ policies toward migrants worldwide expose them to human rights abuses including labor exploitation, inadequate access to health care, and prolonged detention in poor, overcrowded conditions.

Kuwaiti lawmakers should include domestic workers under a major new labor law, Human Rights Watch said today. The draft law would toughen penalties for private companies that abuse their workers, but would not extend its protections to the country’s 600,000 migrant domestic workers. The law is scheduled for a vote in the National Assembly on December 6, 2009.

The prosecutor-general should immediately order the release of Muhammad Abd al-Qadir al-Jasim, a lawyer and journalist who is a prominent critic of the government.

Governments in the Middle East should act quickly in 2009 to fulfill longstanding promises to protect migrant women’s rights, said Human Rights Watch today, ahead of December 18, 2008, International Migrants’ Day. A number of governments have promised major reforms in the response to widespread and egregious abuse, but have yet to finalize and carry out these plans.

New arrests show that Kuwait has resumed enforcing a repressive dress code that criminalizes “imitating the appearance of the opposite sex,” Human Rights Watch said today. It called on the government to investigate allegations of ill-treatment of people detained and to repeal the offending provision, which violates Kuwait’s human rights obligations.

Human Rights Watch writes to urge Dr. Ihsanoglu to use his position as Secretary General of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to support measures at the upcoming Summit of the Organisation of Islamic Conference in Dakar, Senegal on March 13-14 that would improve and strengthen the 1999 OIC Convention on Combating International Terrorism. In particular, the OIC should consider two amendments to the Convention to narrow its overbroad definition of terrorism and make absolutely clear that there is no sanction in Islam for deliberately attacking civilians, whatever the circumstances or justifications.

When labor ministers from 22 Asian and Middle Eastern countries meet in Abu Dhabi this week to discuss Asian contract migrant workers, they should address widespread violations of migrant workers’ rights.