The UN Human Rights Council has been looking at Kuwait this month under its periodic review system. As is now customary at these sessions, the Kuwaiti minister of social affairs, Mohammad al-Afasi, gave an upbeat assessment of the country's human rights achievements and its future good intentions. Others have been more critical.

The human rights situation in Kuwait has deteriorated in the last year with "continued violations against expatriate workers,bedoons [stateless people], women and the media," according to a report by the Kuwait Society for Human Rights. The society also highlighted "failure to reform visa rules, inadequate new labour laws, failure to address discrimination of bedoons and women and the arrest of MPs and journalists for speaking out."

Besides continuing problems with freedom of expression, two major issues in Kuwait are the treatment of migrant domestic workers (thought to number more than 660,000) and around 100,000 bedoons (or bidun) – long-term residents who lack Kuwaiti nationality.

Regarding domestic workers, Human Rights Watch says:

The country's 2010 labour law continues to exclude domestic workers from labour protections required for other workers. In addition, Kuwait's immigration sponsorship system traps workers in abusive employment situations by making it a violation of the law for a migrant worker to leave a job without the employer's consent.

Domestic workers are unable to escape abusive employers or to seek redress even though workloads often exceed 15 hours a day, and there are frequent complaints of unpaid salaries.

Meanwhile, Kuwait continues to portray the bidun as "illegal residents". HRW says:

Many Bidun families have lived in Kuwait for generations, since the founding of the Kuwaiti state, but failed to apply for nationality at that time. Now, they cannot bring their citizenship claims before the courts because the 1959 Nationality Law prohibits judicial review of such claims. Kuwait now classifies the Bidun as residents without legal status ...

They frequently cannot obtain essential state-issued documents, such as marriage licences and birth and death certificates, making it difficult or impossible for them to own property or even legally establish a family.

The UN Human Rights Council was established in 2006 as a replacement for the discredited Commission on Human Rights. Although this is an improvement on the previous body, itsmembership is still somewhat problematic, allowing various countries with poor human rights records to gang up and protect fellow-offenders.

However, the periodic review system – one of the council's key elements – is basically a sound idea. It provides for the performance of all the UN's member states to be scrutinised in rotation. This identifies specific areas of concern and usually results in some undertakings from the member concerned (even if the member later ignores them, as happened with Egypt over itsemergency law).

The council's next periodic review, later this year, will include three Arab states: Lebanon, Libya and Mauritania.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 14 May 2010.