James Tarik Marriott (@jtamarriott)— a freelance writer who previously studied Middle East Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
‘Development is not a goal in itself. Rather, it exists for building man, who is its means and producer. Therefore, development must not stop at achievement of a diversified economy. It must go beyond that and contribute to the formation of the citizen who is capable of taking part in the process of progress and comprehensive development.’—Sultan Qaboos, 2nd July 1995.
This quote is an uncharacteristic quote for the former ruler of Oman. Uncharacteristic because five years earlier he had called the economy ‘the yardstick against which progress can be measured’, and ruled Oman with that in mind. Oman’s progress through its renaissance has almost exclusively been economic and technological, conforming to Toby Jones’s concept of the ‘Dogma of Development’[1]. Political and social progress was made only incrementally, and through the absolutist state constructed by Qaboos when he took power. Human rights, often being considered political in nature, have been subject to the incremental and overbearing will of the state and as a result have progressed only incrementally, if at all.
In trying to understand the history of this it’s important to look at Oman’s relationship with the human rights treaty bodies at the UN. Communication between a state and the UN treaty bodies goes through cycles. Cycles begin with a report that often leads to a meeting. After the meeting, the UN committee publishes concluding observations that include recommendations, and the cycle continues with the next report. These discussion focus on one of the various human rights conventions Oman has joined since 1996.
Oman’s relationship to the UN treaty bodies has been convoluted and at times strained. On certain issues, representatives supply committees with a surplus of information and are responsive to their observations and recommendations. On other issues, evasion and denial prevent any meaningful work. In the areas of racial discrimination, discrimination against women, and directly political rights Oman’s policy takes one of two approaches. The issue first is denied, stating no discrimination exists and human rights are perfectly upheld without a single case that needs reporting. The other option is evasive answers that refuse to accept definitions of concepts, identities of groups, or simply avoid providing data that would reveal human rights issues.
A persistent definitional problem that exists throughout the various committees and discussions is the difference between de jure and de facto progress. The ability to pass a law may represent a legal change towards respecting human rights, however, if this is not enforced or respected in reality throughout society it affects little change. This is an abiding problem in Oman’s approach to human rights. A law may be passed, but it’s not implemented. Often cosmetic changes give the illusion of change, while a lack of statistics and information make it impossible to gauge tangible improvement. To track this history through its stops and starts it is important to begin with the first phase of discussions that start with the Basic Law in 1996, and ends with the Arab Spring protests in 2011.
Setting the Foundation, 1996-2011
Oman’s history with the UN treaty bodies begins in the late 1990s. In 1996 the Basic Law provided a quasi-constitutional outline, among its provisions included the rudiments of human rights protections[2]. For instance, Article 17 promised equality before the law and rejected discrimination on various grounds. This broad article becomes subject to exceptions and contradictions as legal, religious, and cultural customs come to bear on it. Regardless, Oman’s relationship with the United Nations treaty bodies began in December of 1996 with its accession to its first convention.
Oman’s work on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is perhaps its best work to date within the UN human rights organisation. Its first report[3] submitted in 1999 was riding on a wave of praise from UNICEF[4] for its significant drop in child mortality and school enrolment. However, noting the progress it made the report does not shy away from the problems of child malnutrition which it sought to address through proper research and targeted action. Following a meeting[5] with the committee for the convention specific issues were raised about a formal body for child complaints, educational disparities between boys and girls, and the reservations Oman held when acceding to the convention. This was to be the main point to their concluding observations[6] which required more monitoring and an effort in producing a ‘rights-based approach’ to legislation protecting children. Near the end of this cycle in 2003 the Oman social indicator database was set up to promote the storage and access of relevant data. This helped its work in the second reporting cycle.
By 2004 it was time for Oman’s second periodical report[7] on the CRC. The report, submitted in 2005, took on many of the queries and suggestions of the previous cycle. It furnished a legal definition of ‘child’, attempted to demonstrate safeguards against maltreatment of children and for disabled children, and provided statistics relevant to the CRC. Statistical data was further provided in response[8] to a list of issues, breaking down data in every relevant field except regional and ethnic categories. Despite the productive exchange, by 2006 problems were arising. The first was the nationality law that only allowed the father to pass on Omani nationality to their children in normal circumstances. To the UN committee, this constituted discrimination against women (a topic taken up later) and their children. Other issues ‘not sufficiently addressed’ were listed in the second concluding observations[9], the most important of which was its reservations to the CRC. These nascent problems were to be found in work on other conventions at the same time.
In January 2003 Oman acceded to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Its first report[10] was submitted on the 3rd of October 2005 and began with less honesty than did its report on the rights of the child. Its first clause began by saying any discussion on human rights in Oman ‘would not be complete without an allusion, even a brief one, to its history’. It continued saying ‘Oman had been an empire with a flourishing civilization until the nineteenth century when it lapsed into an almost complete isolation from the outside world’. This was the only historical context it offered to the UN committee on racial discrimination, a glaring omission given the entirety of its history.
Oman since the late eighteenth century controlled the majority of the East Africa slave trade through Zanzibar with historical estimates for the nineteenth century falling between one and three million slaves traded[11]. For those traded to the Arabian Gulf estimates for the nineteenth century are in the hundreds of thousands[12]. By the beginning of the twentieth century, an estimated 25% of the population of Muscat and Muttrah were of the East African diaspora, not to mention populations from Baluchistan and other regions associated with Oman’s empire[13]. This history, carefully omitted, allowed for Oman’s report to state ‘the Sultanate has never known any system of racial discrimination or segregation’. Even bolder was the claim that ‘cases of racial discrimination are non-existent in the Sultanate’.
The extraordinary claims were carefully scrutinized by the committee in 2006 in its concluding observations[14] of the report. Criticism was levelled against the claim of Oman’s ethnic homogeneity and the presence of ethnic groups originating from Baluchistan, Zanzibar, and South and East Asian countries. Furthermore, legislative tools like article 17 of the Basic Law and Article 130 of the penal code did not list ‘race’ or ‘ethnic origin’ as categories for possible discrimination. Oman was in an impossible position of claiming no need for anti-racial discrimination laws because there were no cases, a situation made only possible by the absence of such laws. This evasive attitude was to continue past 2011 as well as show up in the last major area of human rights work done before 2011: discrimination against women.
On the 7th of February, 2006 Oman acceded to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Its first report[15] was submitted 13th October 2009, and like the first report on racial discrimination began by stating an impossible contradiction:
In addressing matters pertaining to women’s lives and affairs, the Omani legislative approach is based on two fundamental principles: equality between men and women in general and respect for women’s innate nature [emphasis added].
This ‘innate nature’ underlies some of the claims in the report. First, that as Oman is ‘an oriental Muslim society’ it gives ‘tutelage to the man’. This general principle manifests itself in the Nationality Law and provisions in the Personal Status Law that outline guardianship, inheritance, and rights related to marriage and divorce. An extraordinary aspect of women’s status in Oman is the recorded prevalence of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). The report indicated the findings of a health survey conducted in 2000 which found 85% of women approved of FGM and 53% of females have undergone FGM.
Two meetings
were held following this report that subjected its contents to scrutiny. The first[16]
pointed out the absence of any clear legal definition of discrimination against
women. It continued to request Oman’s reservations to the convention be
withdrawn and noted serious underrepresentation of women in political
positions. The second[17]
meeting focused on the nationality, guardianship, divorce, polygamy and family
law generally. One overarching suggestion was that Oman could follow the move
other countries—e.g. Egypt and Morroco—had made in reinterpreting and
accommodating sharia to modern legal principles.The concluding
observations[18]
recommended legislation creating a clear definition and prohibition of
discrimination against women and specific laws on violence against women. Among
other points of representation and gender stereotyping it requested both the
collection of data on FGM and a law specifically prohibiting it as a practice.
These requests were to be a source for controversy in Oman as human rights took
centre stage with the arrival of the Arab Spring in Oman.
[1] Jones, T. (2015) ‘The Dogma of Development’, In: Saudi Arabia in Transition: Insights on Social, Political, Economic and Religious Change. Available from: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/saudi-arabia-in-transition/dogma-of-development/BDA0296D383CB87C8DB5FC651BF9546B
[2] Royal Decree No. 101/96, ‘Promulgating the Basic Statute of the State’, Available from: https://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/om/om016en.pdf
[3] Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Initial reports of States parties due in 1999: Oman’, 18 July 2000, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2f78%2fAdd.1&Lang=en
[4] UNICEF, ‘The State of the World’s Children 1998’, Available from: https://www.unicef.org/sowc/archive/ENGLISH/The%20State%20of%20the%20World%27s%20Children%201998.pdf, pg. 40.
[5] Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Summary Record of the 728th Meeting’, 27 September 2001, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2fSR.728&Lang=en
[6] Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 44 of the Convention’, 6 November 2001, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2f15%2fAdd.161&Lang=en
[7] Committee on the Rights on the Child, ‘Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 44 of the Convention’, 28 April 2005, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2fOMN%2f2&Lang=en
[8] Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Written Replies by the Government of Oman’, 22 Aug 2006, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2fOMN%2fQ%2f2%2fAdd.1&Lang=en
[9] Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 44 of the Convention: Oman’, 29 September 2006, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2fOMN%2fCO%2f2&Lang=en
[10] Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, ‘Reports Submitted by Parties Under Article 9 of the Convention: Oman’, 3 October 2005, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CERD%2fC%2fOMN%2f1&Lang=en
[11] Hopper, M. (2015). Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire, Yale University Press: London, pp. 35-36.
[12] Ibid, pg. 39. Depending on scholars and methodology the estimates range between 150,000 and 805,000.
[13] Ibid, pg. 9.
[14] Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, ‘Concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: Oman’, 19 October 2006, Available: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CERD%2fC%2fOMN%2fCO%2f1&Lang=en
[15] Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, ‘Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 18 on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women: Oman’, 20 July 2010, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CEDAW%2fC%2fOMN%2f1&Lang=en
[16] Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, ‘Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 18 of the Convention: Initial report of Oman’, 4 October 2011, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CEDAW%2fC%2fSR.998&Lang=en
[17] Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, ‘Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 18 of the Convention: Initial report of Oman (continued)’, 4 October 2011, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CEDAW%2fC%2fSR.999&Lang=en
[18] Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, ‘Concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women’, 4 November 2011, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CEDAW%2fC%2fOMN%2fCO%2f1&Lang=en
ess and comprehensive development.’—Sultan Qaboos, 2nd July 1995.
This quote is an uncharacteristic quote for the former ruler of Oman. Uncharacteristic because five years earlier he had called the economy ‘the yardstick against which progress can be measured’, and ruled Oman with that in mind. Oman’s progress through its renaissance has almost exclusively been economic and technological, conforming to Toby Jones’s concept of the ‘Dogma of Development’[1]. Political and social progress was made only incrementally, and through the absolutist state constructed by Qaboos when he took power. Human rights, often being considered political in nature, have been subject to the incremental and overbearing will of the state and as a result have progressed only incrementally, if at all.
In trying to understand the history of this it’s important to look at Oman’s relationship with the Human Rights Council at the UN. Communication between a state and the UN Human Rights Council goes through cycles. Cycles begin with a report that often leads to a meeting. After the meeting, the UN committee publishes concluding observations that include recommendations, and the cycle continues with the next report. These discussion focus on one of the various human rights conventions Oman has joined since 1996.
Oman’s relationship to the UN Human Rights Council has been convoluted and at times strained. On certain issues, representatives supply committees with a surplus of information and are responsive to their observations and recommendations. On other issues, evasion and denial prevent any meaningful work. In the areas of racial discrimination, discrimination against women, and directly political rights Oman’s policy takes one of two approaches. The issue first is denied, stating no discrimination exists and human rights are perfectly upheld without a single case that needs reporting. The other option is evasive answers that refuse to accept definitions of concepts, identities of groups, or simply avoid providing data that would reveal human rights issues.
A persistent definitional problem that exists throughout the various committees and discussions is the difference between de jure and de facto progress. The ability to pass a law may represent a legal change towards respecting human rights, however, if this is not enforced or respected in reality throughout society it affects little change. This is an abiding problem in Oman’s approach to human rights. A law may be passed, but it’s not implemented. Often cosmetic changes give the illusion of change, while a lack of statistics and information make it impossible to gauge tangible improvement. To track this history through its stops and starts it is important to begin with the first phase of discussions that start with the Basic Law in 1996, and ends with the Arab Spring protests in 2011.
Setting the Foundation, 1996-2011
Oman’s history with the UN Human Rights Council begins in the late 1990s. In 1996 the Basic Law provided a quasi-constitutional outline, among its provisions included the rudiments of human rights protections[2]. For instance, Article 17 promised equality before the law and rejected discrimination on various grounds. This broad article becomes subject to exceptions and contradictions as legal, religious, and cultural customs come to bear on it. Regardless, Oman’s relationship with the United Nations Human Rights Council began in December of 1996 with its accession to its first convention.
Oman’s work on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is perhaps its best work to date within the UN human rights organisation. Its first report[3] submitted in 1999 was riding on a wave of praise from UNICEF[4] for its significant drop in child mortality and school enrolment. However, noting the progress it made the report does not shy away from the problems of child malnutrition which it sought to address through proper research and targeted action. Following a meeting[5] with the committee for the convention specific issues were raised about a formal body for child complaints, educational disparities between boys and girls, and the reservations Oman held when acceding to the convention. This was to be the main point to their concluding observations[6] which required more monitoring and an effort in producing a ‘rights-based approach’ to legislation protecting children. Near the end of this cycle in 2003 the Oman social indicator database was set up to promote the storage and access of relevant data. This helped its work in the second reporting cycle.
By 2004 it was time for Oman’s second periodical report[7] on the CRC. The report, submitted in 2005, took on many of the queries and suggestions of the previous cycle. It furnished a legal definition of ‘child’, attempted to demonstrate safeguards against maltreatment of children and for disabled children, and provided statistics relevant to the CRC. Statistical data was further provided in response[8] to a list of issues, breaking down data in every relevant field except regional and ethnic categories. Despite the productive exchange, by 2006 problems were arising. The first was the nationality law that only allowed the father to pass on Omani nationality to their children in normal circumstances. To the UN committee, this constituted discrimination against women (a topic taken up later) and their children. Other issues ‘not sufficiently addressed’ were listed in the second concluding observations[9], the most important of which was its reservations to the CRC. These nascent problems were to be found in work on other conventions at the same time.
In January 2003 Oman acceded to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Its first report[10] was submitted on the 3rd of October 2005 and began with less honesty than did its report on the rights of the child. Its first clause began by saying any discussion on human rights in Oman ‘would not be complete without an allusion, even a brief one, to its history’. It continued saying ‘Oman had been an empire with a flourishing civilization until the nineteenth century when it lapsed into an almost complete isolation from the outside world’. This was the only historical context it offered to the UN committee on racial discrimination, a glaring omission given the entirety of its history.
Oman since the late eighteenth century controlled the majority of the East Africa slave trade through Zanzibar with historical estimates for the nineteenth century falling between one and three million slaves traded[11]. For those traded to the Arabian Gulf estimates for the nineteenth century are in the hundreds of thousands[12]. By the beginning of the twentieth century, an estimated 25% of the population of Muscat and Muttrah were of the East African diaspora, not to mention populations from Baluchistan and other regions associated with Oman’s empire[13]. This history, carefully omitted, allowed for Oman’s report to state ‘the Sultanate has never known any system of racial discrimination or segregation’. Even bolder was the claim that ‘cases of racial discrimination are non-existent in the Sultanate’.
The extraordinary claims were carefully scrutinized by the committee in 2006 in its concluding observations[14] of the report. Criticism was levelled against the claim of Oman’s ethnic homogeneity and the presence of ethnic groups originating from Baluchistan, Zanzibar, and South and East Asian countries. Furthermore, legislative tools like article 17 of the Basic Law and Article 130 of the penal code did not list ‘race’ or ‘ethnic origin’ as categories for possible discrimination. Oman was in an impossible position of claiming no need for anti-racial discrimination laws because there were no cases, a situation made only possible by the absence of such laws. This evasive attitude was to continue past 2011 as well as show up in the last major area of human rights work done before 2011: discrimination against women.
On the 7th of February, 2006 Oman acceded to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Its first report[15] was submitted 13th October 2009, and like the first report on racial discrimination began by stating an impossible contradiction:
In addressing matters pertaining to women’s lives and affairs, the Omani legislative approach is based on two fundamental principles: equality between men and women in general and respect for women’s innate nature
. This ‘innate nature’ underlies some of the claims in the report. First, that as Oman is ‘an oriental Muslim society’ it gives ‘tutelage to the man’. This general principle manifests itself in the Nationality Law and provisions in the Personal Status Law that outline guardianship, inheritance, and rights related to marriage and divorce. An extraordinary aspect of women’s status in Oman is the recorded prevalence of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). The report indicated the findings of a health survey conducted in 2000 which found 85% of women approved of FGM and 53% of females have undergone FGM.
Two meetings
were held following this report that subjected its contents to scrutiny. The first[16]
pointed out the absence of any clear legal definition of discrimination against
women. It continued to request Oman’s reservations to the convention be
withdrawn and noted serious underrepresentation of women in political
positions. The second[17]
meeting focused on the nationality, guardianship, divorce, polygamy and family
law generally. One overarching suggestion was that Oman could follow the move
other countries—e.g. Egypt and Morroco—had made in reinterpreting and
accommodating sharia to modern legal principles.The concluding
observations[18]
recommended legislation creating a clear definition and prohibition of
discrimination against women and specific laws on violence against women. Among
other points of representation and gender stereotyping it requested both the
collection of data on FGM and a law specifically prohibiting it as a practice.
These requests were to be a source for controversy in Oman as human rights took
centre stage with the arrival of the Arab Spring in Oman.
[1] Jones, T. (2015) ‘The Dogma of Development’, In: Saudi Arabia in Transition: Insights on Social, Political, Economic and Religious Change. Available from: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/saudi-arabia-in-transition/dogma-of-development/BDA0296D383CB87C8DB5FC651BF9546B
[2] Royal Decree No. 101/96, ‘Promulgating the Basic Statute of the State’, Available from: https://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/om/om016en.pdf
[3] Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Initial reports of States parties due in 1999: Oman’, 18 July 2000, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2f78%2fAdd.1&Lang=en
[4] UNICEF, ‘The State of the World’s Children 1998’, Available from: https://www.unicef.org/sowc/archive/ENGLISH/The%20State%20of%20the%20World%27s%20Children%201998.pdf, pg. 40.
[5] Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Summary Record of the 728th Meeting’, 27 September 2001, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2fSR.728&Lang=en
[6] Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 44 of the Convention’, 6 November 2001, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2f15%2fAdd.161&Lang=en
[7] Committee on the Rights on the Child, ‘Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 44 of the Convention’, 28 April 2005, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2fOMN%2f2&Lang=en
[8] Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Written Replies by the Government of Oman’, 22 Aug 2006, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2fOMN%2fQ%2f2%2fAdd.1&Lang=en
[9] Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 44 of the Convention: Oman’, 29 September 2006, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRC%2fC%2fOMN%2fCO%2f2&Lang=en
[10] Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, ‘Reports Submitted by Parties Under Article 9 of the Convention: Oman’, 3 October 2005, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CERD%2fC%2fOMN%2f1&Lang=en
[11] Hopper, M. (2015). Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire, Yale University Press: London, pp. 35-36.
[12] Ibid, pg. 39. Depending on scholars and methodology the estimates range between 150,000 and 805,000.
[13] Ibid, pg. 9.
[14] Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, ‘Concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: Oman’, 19 October 2006, Available: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CERD%2fC%2fOMN%2fCO%2f1&Lang=en
[15] Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, ‘Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 18 on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women: Oman’, 20 July 2010, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CEDAW%2fC%2fOMN%2f1&Lang=en
[16] Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, ‘Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 18 of the Convention: Initial report of Oman’, 4 October 2011, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CEDAW%2fC%2fSR.998&Lang=en
[17] Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, ‘Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 18 of the Convention: Initial report of Oman (continued)’, 4 October 2011, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CEDAW%2fC%2fSR.999&Lang=en
[18] Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, ‘Concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women’, 4 November 2011, Available from: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CEDAW%2fC%2fOMN%2fCO%2f1&Lang=en
[19] Worall, J. (2012) ‘Oman: The “Forgotten” Corner of the Arab Spring’, Middle East Policy Council, 19(3). Available from: https://mepc.org/oman-forgotten-corner-arab-spring.
[20] Data taken from UK Strategic Export Controls Annual Reports. Available from: https://www.sipri.org/databases/national-reports/United%20Kingdom. Total weapons licensed for trade: 181 (2008), 208 (2009), 144 (2010), 14,280 (2011), 25,072 (2012).
