MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

Armed conflict and the legacy of former conflicts overshadowed other developments in the Middle East and North Africa region in 2006. Throughout the year, against the backdrop of foreign military presence, Iraq continued its inexorable descent into civil war as long-standing political, ethnic and religious fault lines were increasingly exposed amid unrelenting sectarian violence. By the end of the year, the country was enmeshed in killings and other violence, primarily by Sunni and Shi'a groups, that threatened the stability of the whole region.

The long struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories continued to take a heavy toll in civilian lives despite wide international recognition that the conflict was a major cause of political instability in the region and beyond. The 40-year unresolved struggle entered a new phase after Hamas won January's Palestinian elections, defeating the Fatah party led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Frequent Israeli air and artillery attacks resulted in the deaths of more than 650 Palestinians, mostly in the Gaza Strip and mostly in the second half of the year. Further deaths of Palestinians, again mostly in the Gaza Strip, resulted from internecine fighting between members of armed groups linked to the rival Hamas and Fatah parties. Meanwhile, social and economic conditions for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation continued to go from bad to worse as Israel pushed forward its construction of settlements and the building of a 700-kilometre fence/wall in the West Bank, increased or tightened the blockades and restrictions on Palestinian movements, and withheld customs duties due to the Palestinian Authority.

The uneasy relationship between Israel and Arab countries exploded into open conflict in July, when an attack on Israeli soldiers by members of the armed wing of Hizbullah sparked off a 34-day war involving Israel and Lebanon. Around 1,300 people were killed before an internationally negotiated ceasefire took effect on 14 August. Civilians on both sides bore the brunt of the conflict, particularly in Lebanon, where some 1,200 people, including more than 300 children, were killed in Israeli air attacks and artillery bombardment. Much of Lebanon's infrastructure was destroyed or damaged. After the fighting ended, civilians in south Lebanon continued to be killed and maimed by cluster bomblets, some four million of which were fired into the area by Israeli forces in the last days of the war. Both Israeli forces and Hizbullah combatants showed a wanton disregard for civilians and committed gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, including war crimes.

Tensions between Iran and the international community continued to grow over the Iranian government's determination to pursue its nuclear enrichment programme. In December the UN Security Council agreed a programme of sanctions against Iran.

Impunity and accountability

The war between Hizbullah and Israel was a war fought without accountability. When the peace came, neither side took any steps to hold to account those who had committed war crimes and other grave abuses during the conflict, and there was virtually no pressure from the international community for them to do so. But this was not surprising. Rather, it reflected a wider pattern of impunity that remained deeply entrenched throughout the Middle East and North Africa region.

In many countries, security forces were allowed virtual carte blanche to detain, intimidate and torture political opponents and criminal suspects. By failing to hold them to account, the governments to whom these forces reported betrayed their own willingness to condone or acquiesce in such abuses. In Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, political and terrorism suspects were tried before special and military courts. In many cases they were convicted on the basis of contested confessions by judges who rarely showed any inclination to investigate allegations that defendants had been tortured in pre-trial detention. Such courts were intended to provide a veneer of legitimacy, but the abusive systems of which they formed a part - based on prolonged incommunicado detention, torture or other ill-treatment and the extraction of confessions - were fundamentally rotten. They delivered convictions, long sentences and even, in some cases, the death penalty, but they did not deliver justice.

Impunity was also the watchword in Algeria, which through the 1990s experienced an internal conflict estimated to have claimed as many as 200,000 lives. Many were killed by armed groups or by government security forces, while thousands of others were tortured in custody or became victims of enforced disappearances after arrest. In most cases, the individual perpetrators remained unknown and in 2006 there was further evidence that the Algerian authorities intended to keep it that way. President Bouteflika's government enacted amnesty measures to confer legal immunity on members of armed groups and the security forces responsible for serious abuses, and on their political masters. At the same time, it was made a crime to accuse the security forces of violating human rights, raising the prospect that victims and survivors of such violations could be imprisoned for demanding justice.

In neighbouring Morocco, the government continued to address directly some of the wrongs of the past. The Human Rights Advisory Board was charged by King Mohamed VI with following up on the groundbreaking work undertaken previously by the Equity and Reconciliation Commission, which had investigated enforced disappearances and other grave human rights violations committed between 1956 and 1999. The Board began to inform some families of the results of the investigation but progress was disappointingly slow even though the process aimed only to obtain and disseminate the truth, not to bring accountability and justice.

In Iraq, former President Saddam Hussain and seven others were tried for human rights violations in connection with the killings of 148 people from the town of al-Dujail following an assassination attempt on Saddam Hussain in 1982. The trial was billed as an exercise in accountability, and so it should have been. In practice, however, the trial was unfair and undermined by political interference. Its outcome was a foregone conclusion, with the tribunal's appeal chamber acting as little more than a rubber stamp body, and Saddam Hussain was sentenced to death and in December executed. The trial had represented an opportunity to turn the page in Iraq and establish accountability through justice and without recourse to the death penalty. It was an opportunity missed.

Terror and torture

Torture and other ill-treatment continued to be widespread in several countries in the region, including Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Jordan. Such abuses were also reported in Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen.

The USA and some of its European allies remained keen to collaborate with the Algerian authorities in the "war on terror", despite Algeria's shameful amnesty measures and human rights record. The UK government strove unsuccessfully to obtain a "memorandum of understanding" such as it had previously agreed with Lebanon, Libya and Jordan, whereby untried terrorism suspects could be returned forcibly from the UK despite the risk that they would be tortured. Such agreements, based not on law but on mere "diplomatic assurances" that a returnee would not be tortured or executed, were symptomatic of the willingness of the USA and some European countries to engage actively in eroding key human rights safeguards that they had previously helped to develop and to which they had long proclaimed allegiance.

The main symbols of this corrosive pattern were the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the majority of whose inmates came from countries in the Middle East and North Africa region, and the secret renditions of suspected terrorists by the US government, in which a range of Middle Eastern and North African governments were complicit. Little by little, information continued to emerge about this murky multilateral conspiracy of secret detention and interrogation of terrorist suspects and their unlawful transfer from one country to another, pointing to the close involvement of Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian security and intelligence agencies among others with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Three Yemeni nationals, who were released more than a year after they were returned to Yemen from US custody, reported that they had been held for long periods at unknown locations as suspects in the US "war on terror". Other such suspects were repatriated to Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other states after years spent at Guantánamo Bay. Some were subsequently released but others were charged with terrorism-related offences in their home countries.

In Iraq, the US-led Multinational Force continued to hold thousands of detainees without charge or trial, although batches of detainees were released periodically during the year. After the scandal of torture and other abuses at Abu Ghraib in 2004, greatest concern focused on the plight of those detained by Iraqi police and other security forces, some units of which were largely drawn from supporters of Shi'a armed groups. There were continuing reports of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees held by some of these forces, and the Iraqi authorities showed little appetite to investigate or take action against those who abused prisoners.

Women's rights

Women remained in a subordinate position - legally, politically and in practice - across the region as a deep-seated culture of gender discrimination continued to hold sway. However, some advances were achieved that offered encouragement to a growing women's rights movement.

In Kuwait, women participated for the first time in national elections and in Bahrain 18 women candidates stood in elections for the House of Representatives, although only one was successful. The Moroccan government announced that it would withdraw its reservations to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and took steps to strengthen legislation
on domestic violence, and Oman acceded to CEDAW. In Saudi Arabia, there was some movement towards establishing a specialized court to deal with cases of domestic violence, but women continued to face pervasive forms of discrimination, including severe restrictions on their freedom of movement.

These and other developments represented a step forward but only a small and halting one, underlining just how much more needs to be done to give real substance to the notion of women's rights. "Honour killings" persisted in Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Iraq, Syria and other states in which the perpetrators benefited from laws that belittled their crimes. Throughout the region women were inadequately protected against other violence within the family. There were also worrying reports of trafficking of women in Oman, Qatar and other states.

In Iran, the all-male Council of Guardians ruled ineligible at least 12 women who wished to stand as candidates in elections for the important Assembly of Experts. Demonstrators who called for an end to legal discrimination against women were violently dispersed by the security forces. Despite this, the country's resilient women's rights activists were anything but deterred; they launched a campaign to collect a million signatures nationally in support of their demand for an end to legal discrimination.

Discrimination

Discrimination on the basis of religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other grounds was prevalent in a number of countries in the region, while the religious sectarianism of the Iraq conflict raised tensions between Sunnis and Shi'as. In Iran, members of the Arab, Azerbaijani, Kurdish and Baluchi minorities were increasingly restive in the face of continuing discrimination and repression, while members of religious minorities - Baha'is, Nematollahi Sufis and Christians - were detained or harassed on account of their faith. Baha'is were also subject to discrimination in Egypt, where they were required to present themselves as members of other faiths in order to obtain official documents such as identity cards and birth certificates. In Syria, discrimination continued against the Kurdish minority, with thousands of Syrian Kurds effectively made stateless and so denied equal access to basic social and economic rights, while in Qatar the cases of some 2,000 people deprived of their nationality in previous years remained unresolved.

The Israeli authorities imposed further discriminatory measures against Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, including by reinforcing the system of segregated roads and checkpoints established on behalf of Israeli settlers residing in the Occupied Territories.

Refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants

Unsurprisingly, the conflict in Iraq and the war between Hizbullah and Israeli forces caused widespread internal displacement and large outflows of refugees into neighbouring countries. In both Israel and Lebanon, most of those displaced returned to their villages and neighbourhoods once the fighting stopped, although many Lebanese people did so only to find that their homes had been destroyed and their fields and orchards contaminated by unexploded cluster bomblets. Some 200,000 other Lebanese people were still displaced at the end of the year. Syria, together with Jordan, absorbed most of the refugees who fled the violence in Iraq; estimates suggested that more than half a million Iraqis had taken refuge in Syria by the end of 2006. In Lebanon, around 300,000 Palestinian refugees, in most cases refugees from events surrounding the creation of the state of Israel and the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, maintained a precarious existence, tolerated but far from fully accepted by Lebanese authorities who continued to deny or limit their access to certain basic rights.

In North Africa, refugees and migrants from countries to the south, many of them seeking entry to European Union states, were liable to detention and summary expulsion by security forces in Morocco, Algeria and Libya. There were three further deaths of migrants at the hands of security forces at the border fence between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Even recognized refugees were swept up and expelled by police in Morocco and allegedly abused and robbed in the process. In Libya, the authorities announced that they had increased expulsions of migrants tenfold compared to 2004.

In the Gulf and elsewhere, migrant workers had their rights abused amid a mix of inadequate legal protection, exploitative employers and government complacency. However, in Kuwait, where there were complaints about the treatment of South Asian and Filipino nationals, new legislation was introduced to afford some protection to migrant domestic workers, and in the UAE the government announced new measures to improve living and working conditions for migrant workers. In Oman, the right of workers to form trade unions was set out in law for the first time, although domestic workers were excluded.

Death penalty

This ultimate form of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment was used extensively throughout much of the region, although Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia continued to refrain from carrying out executions. In Iran, at least 177 people were executed, including one minor and three others whose crimes were committed when they were minors, and there were at least 39 executions in Saudi Arabia, mostly of foreign nationals. Bahrain carried out three executions, the first since 1996. Here too, those executed were foreigners. The execution of Saddam Hussain at the very end of the year was particularly significant and controversial, due to its timing, its especially grotesque and degrading manner, and the widespread sense within the region and beyond that it represented no more than "victor's justice" and an act of vengeance, rather than true justice or accountability.

Dissent

The limits of dissent remained tightly drawn in most of the region by governments intolerant of opposition and by other forces anxious to control debate. In most countries, the media operated within strict constraints and under threat of criminal prosecution should they cause insult or offence to government leaders or officials. Journalists were prosecuted under defamation laws in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco, while in Iran, newspapers continued to be closed down and journalists detained and abused. State controls also extended to use of the Internet. In Bahrain, the government banned several sites; the Syrian authorities blocked access to sites providing news and comment on Syria; and bloggers who criticized the authorities were detained in Egypt and Iran.

The publication in Denmark of cartoons offensive to many Muslims sparked violent reactions, and in Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen editors and journalists were prosecuted for republishing them. Subsequently, Iran's President caused similar offence by publicly questioning the Holocaust. However, the Iranian authorities promptly closed Iran newspaper after it published a cartoon found to be offensive to the country's Azerbaijani minority.

Human rights defenders continued to speak up for tolerance in the face of intolerance, and for freedom of expression and the right to dissent, despite harassment and intimidation, the threat of arrest and prosecutions. They did so at particular risk to themselves in Iran, Syria, Tunisia and Western Sahara, but also faced threats and intimidation in other countries, including Algeria and Lebanon.