Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup left a legacy of widespread migrant labor abuses, including thousands of unexplained deaths, rampant wage theft, and exorbitant recruitment fees. Qatari authorities and FIFA have failed to compensate abused workers who made the tournament possible. Migrant workers also faced new forms of exploitation after the tournament ended and are at risk of government backtracking on existing reforms. Qatari laws discriminate against women due to abusive male guardianship policies and against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals. Authorities restrict free expression and have strengthened their surveillance capabilities. After the 2022-2024 term, Qatar was re-elected to serve as a member of the UN Human Rights Council for the term 2025-2027. As a member, Qatar should “uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights.”
Migrant Worker Rights
Migrant workers form over 91 percent of Qatar’s population and are governed by the abusive kafala (sponsorship) system that gives employers disproportionate control over workers. In the lead up to the tournament, Qatar introduced significant labor reforms that allow migrant workers to change jobs or exit the country without employer permission, initiated wage protection measures such as Wage Protection System and Workers’ Support and Insurance Fund, and set a higher minimum wage for all workers. Yet, the benefits of these initiatives have been limited due to their late introduction, narrow scope, and weak enforcement.
Abusive elements of the kafala system remain intact. Workers still struggle to change jobs easily as in practice they are required to obtain signed letters from their original employer approving their resignation. Workers are unable to change jobs even when their employers fail to pay them. Qatar risks backtracking on some of the reforms, exemplified by the Qatar’s advisory Shura Council’s 2024 proposal to adopt measures that would require migrant workers to obtain their employer’s permission before being allowed to leave the country. In 2020, Qatar extended the reform removing the requirement to obtain an exit permit to leave the country to include domestic workers.
Qatar’s minimum wage, introduced in 2021, is set at QAR 1,000 (US$274) per month. This amount does not account for the high living expenses in Qatar and has not been revised since 2021, when it was first introduced. Human Rights Watch has documented that widespread wage abuses have persisted. In many cases, migrant workers resort to protests and strikes against wage delays despite the risk of arrest and deportation.
Leaving an employer without permission, known as “absconding,” remains a crime. Passport confiscations, high recruitment fees, and deceptive recruitment practices remain largely unpunished. Despite the scrutiny brought on migrant worker deaths in Qatar in the lead up to the 2022 World Cup, Qatar has failed to prevent, investigate, or compensate the deaths of thousands of migrant workers.
The new UK government announced the resumption of negotiations for a free trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), despite ongoing concerns about the lack of transparency, oversight, and inclusion of concrete human rights protections and commitments in any agreement, particularly for migrant workers.
Women’s and Girls’ Rights
Women in Qatar are subjected to male guardianship laws that discriminate against and undermine women’s right to make autonomous decisions about marriage, divorce, and children.
Qatar’s Personal Status Law provides that women can only marry if a male guardian approves of the marriage while men do not need permission and are allowed to have up to four wives at once. A woman is also required to obey her husband, maintain the house and its contents, and breastfeed children unless there is an impediment. A wife can lose her right to maintenance if she refuses to have sexual relations with her husband “without a legitimate reason” or works outside the marital home without her husband’s permission.
Women do not have a unilateral right to divorce on an equal basis as men and must apply to the courts for divorce on limited grounds, such as if her husband is impotent, has abandoned or harmed her, or if her husband fails to provide financial support.
Female siblings receive half the amount their brothers get under inheritance provisions.
Women in Qatar face mobility restrictions preventing them from moving freely in their own country and travelling outside Qatar without the permission of their male guardians. For example, female students in Qatar are required to show that they have male guardian permission before they can go on field trips or stay at or leave campus accommodations or grounds. Interior ministry rules require unmarried Qatari women under 25 to show male guardian permission to travel abroad while Qatari men can travel without such permission from age 18. Male guardians can apply to issue travel bans on their female relatives or wives.
Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
Qatar’s penal code criminalizes extramarital sex. Individuals convicted of zina (sex outside of marriage) can be sentenced to up to seven years imprisonment. Muslims can also be sentenced to flogging (if unmarried) or the death penalty (if married) for zina. These laws disproportionately impact women, as pregnancy serves as evidence of extramarital sex and women who report rape can find themselves prosecuted for consensual sex.
Qatar’s penal code criminalizes consensual sexual relations outside marriage, including same-sex relations, with up to seven years in prison. The Law on Protection of Community allows for provisional detention without charge or trial for up to six months, if “there exist well-founded reasons to believe that the defendant may have committed a crime,” including “violating public morality.” Qatari authorities also censor mainstream media reports about sexual orientation and gender identity.
Qatari authorities in February arrested a British-Mexican national, Manuel Guerrero Aviña, who lived in Qatar for seven years, after agreeing to meet someone through the Grindr dating app. While he was targeted for his sexual orientation and HIV status, he was charged with drug offenses. He left Qatar in August after an unsuccessful appeal.
Freedom of Expression
Qatar’s penal code criminalizes criticizing the emir, insulting Qatar’s flag, defaming religion including blasphemy, and inciting “to overthrow the regime.” Qatar’s cybercrime law punishes online activity that authorities perceive to spread “false news,” “violates social values or principles,” or “insults or slanders others.”
In 2024, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention took up the case of Abdul Ibhais, a former media and communications director for the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy who is serving jail sentence for bribery but claims being subject to a malicious prosecution in retaliation for his criticism of handling of a migrant workers’ strike in Qatar in August 2019. The UN Working Group concluded that there was no legal basis for his detention and that there were multiple violations of his right to a fair trial, including refusing to investigate his allegations of a coerced confession and denying him legal assistance.
Statelessness
Qatar’s decision to arbitrarily strip families from the Ghufran clan of their citizenship since 1996 has left some members stateless and deprived them of basic human rights like the right to work, access to health care, education, marriage and starting a family, owning property, and freedom of movement.
Climate Change Policy and Actions
Qatar is the 14th largest oil producer worldwide, has the third largest natural gas reserves globally and is among the highest greenhouse gas emissions per capita globally. Qatar is increasing liquefied natural gas production for export instead of taking concrete steps to move away from the production and use of fossil fuels.
Migrant workers continue to be exposed to extreme heat risks despite the introduction of new protections against heat stress, including prohibiting work when the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) exceeds 32.1 degrees Celsius. Although these protections in Qatar go further than other GCC states, they offer considerably less than what is needed, as the 32.1 degrees Celsius WBGT threshold is set too high to effectively protect workers and enforcement gaps remain. Qatari authorities’ failure to protect migrant workers from climate change-related extreme heat exposure and related illnesses, including organ failure, shifts the care burden to overstretched healthcare systems of migrant origin countries.
Granting Health Access to Injured Palestinians from Gaza
Qatari authorities invited a team of Human Rights Watch researchers to Doha in June 2024 and facilitated their unrestricted access to hospitals treating Palestinians who were injured in Gaza, as well as to a housing complex that family members of the medical patients were residing in.