smugglers. These and other “push” factors led tens of thousands to seek refuge elsewhere, often by paying criminal peoplesmugglers to risk their lives in flimsy, overcrowded craft that set out from Turkish, Libyan and other shores in often vain attempts to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Thousands reached Europe, where they faced uncertain futures; thousands of others, including children, drowned. Elsewhere in the region, migrant workers, many from Asia, continued to experience exploitation and abuses. In Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, where migrant workers formed a majority of the population and their labour underpinned the national economies, restrictive sponsorship policies continued to tie workers to employers, increasing migrant workers’ vulnerability. In Saudi Arabia, many migrants were left destitute after the government cut spending on construction and other projects. Migrant domestic workers, predominantly women, remained especially vulnerable to abuse by employers – including sexual and other physical and psychological abuse and forced labour – due to the continuing failure of state authorities to extend basic labour law safeguards to the domestic employment sector. In Jordan, some 80,000 women migrants employed as domestic workers were excluded from the protection of labour laws, placing them at risk of violence and exploitation, according to a local workers’ rights group. WOMEN’S RIGHTS Throughout the region, women and girls were denied equal status with men in law and in practice and were subject to gender-based violence, including sexual violence and killings perpetrated in the name of “honour”. Male “guardianship” rules restricted women’s freedom of movement and access to higher education and employment in Saudi Arabia, where the authorities also continued to prohibit women from driving motor vehicles. Family laws discriminating against women in relation to marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance remained prevalent, and in many countries laws failed to protect from, Amnesty International Report 2016/17 and even facilitated, sexual violence against women – for example, by failing to criminalize early and forced marriage and marital rape and by allowing rapists to escape prosecution by marrying their victim. Authorities in Bahrain and Jordan took action during the year to remove or reduce this provision for rapists from their penal codes, and in other positive developments draft laws on combating violence against women appeared to be advancing towards enactment in Morocco and Tunisia. In other states, however, laws continued to prescribe lesser punishment for crimes of violence against women, including murder, if the perpetrators committed them in the name of “family honour”, or made women liable to criminal prosecution for reporting rape; these laws perpetuated conditions that both facilitate and obscure potentially high levels of domestic violence against women and girls. Women’s rights activists faced arrest, imprisonment and harassment by Ministry of Intelligence and Revolutionary Guards officials in Iran, and the authorities used “morality police” to enforce compulsory “veiling” laws on women, who regularly suffered harassment, violence, arbitrary arrest and detention on account of their dress. Meanwhile, draft laws that heeded the Supreme Leader’s call for greater compliance with women’s “traditional” roles as home makers and child bearers threatened to reduce women’s access to sexual and reproductive health. Conditions for women and girls were especially perilous in areas of armed conflict, where they endured siege, aerial bombing and other forms of attack by both government and opposition forces. Many were rendered more vulnerable to abuses such as human trafficking by the death or disappearance of spouses and other male relatives. In areas of Iraq and Syria that they controlled, IS forces continued to hold thousands of Yazidi women and girls captive, subjecting them to sexual violence, enslavement, including sexual slavery, and forced conversion. 53