Our work in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries
The ICRC in the Gulf works to promote and ensure respect for the rules of war. We facilitate ICRC operations worldwide through dialogue with government, civil society, military, and diplomatic officials and we are a key source of reference for IHL and humanitarian policy in the GCC countries. The ICRC has helped to ascertain the fate of people missing in connection with the 1990–1991 Gulf War and support their families.
We work on reconnecting separated families in the region through a wide range of activities, including: tracing requests, exchange of messages, facilitating phone and video calls between detainees in the Gulf and their families, and issuing emergency travel documents to support family reunification.
Our teams visit places of detention in some of the GCC countries to monitor the living conditions of detainees and communicate bilaterally their findings and recommendations from these visits to the authorities concerned. This is to ensure that detainees are treated with dignity and that their living conditions, including access to health care, are of an acceptable standard.
