The MEG Region

Middle East and Gulf

Amnesty International campaigns for human rights all over the world. One region we work on is the Middle East and Gulf (MEG) region.

It consists of:

Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories | Lebanon | Syria | Jordan | Iran | Iraq | Kuwait | Qatar | Bahrain | United Arab Emirates | Oman | Saudi Arabia | Yemen

Background

2011 was a year without precedent for the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa region. It was a year in which millions of people of all ages and backgrounds, especially the young and often with women to the fore, flooded on to the streets to demand change. Often, they continued to do so in the face of extreme violence meted out by the military and security forces of those who claimed to govern – and who had continued to enjoy and to squander the fruits of power – in their very name.

Dubbed the “Arab Spring”, in fact the protests brought together in common cause people from many different communities – certainly Arabs for the most part but also Amazigh, Kurds and others. It was as if a tightly wound coil of frustration caused by years of oppression, human rights violations, misrule and corruption was suddenly unsprung, releasing an energy and power that ordinary people until then had neither experienced nor realised that they possessed.

It was a year like no other, when the whole region shook as ordinary people summoned up the courage to provide a demonstration of “people’s power” such as the region had never seen before and, incredibly, to sustain it even when the might of the repressive state and its security forces were deployed against them.