3 years ago in 2017, an air, land, and sea blockade was imposed on Qatar by four Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. This caused them to cut all trade ties with Doha and they claimed that it supported terrosrism. They also said that their ties with Iran were a little too close. But more recently on thursday, the UN special Rapporteur published a report stating the negative effects of sanctions on human rights. The report also called for all blockading nations to, “immediately withdraw all sanctions/measures aimed at establishing restrictions on freedom of expression, movement, access to property, trade barriers, and ban tariffs, quotas, non-tariff measures … for people living in Qatar in violation of international legal standards”.
“Measures directly affecting fundamental human rights shall not be used as the means of influencing the government,” said Alena Douhan. Qatar backfired at the statements and said that they had no legitimate justification to tell the blockading nations to withdrawal. The report also said that there was wrongful treatment of Qataris by the boycotting countries at the start of the blockade, which interrupted family relations, work and study.
I think that this was a very good choice by the four nations to have cut ties with Doha in 2017. I do think that a lot of time has passed and they have changed alot since then and maybe its time for them to start reconciling the damage made. The 4 countries gave a list of demands that were to be carried out within 10 days, but Qatar rejected almost immediately. This is a red flag to me and I hope the nations realize it as well. I think that there should be more NGOs involved in the situation, because NGOs typically focus on helping people facing discrimination or having issues with health, basically just human rights issues. And that is what this whole issue is about.