Progress Amid Resistance

420 WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICAthrough democratic means. Moreover, in a society where cultural normsare the source of most restrictions on women’s lives, and where laws areoften unknown to people and inconsistently enforced, legal reforms alonewill be of limited consequence.RecommendationsF The government should implement improvements to and ensure en -forcement of health insurance and health care for non-Qatari women.F The government should allow and encourage the creation and institutionalizationof nongovernmental organizations serving women andaddressing women’s concerns.F The media should examine the impact of increased economic participationon women’s role in society and consistently report on violationsof women’s rights, paying particular attention to the plight of impoverishedwomen.F Foreign embassies should make efforts to provide basic computer literacycourses to their citizens residing in Qatar and offer online andprinted materials that inform these individuals about their employment,housing, and health care rights and the means by which toinvoke them in the Qatari legal system.AUTHORSJulia Breslin is a human rights lawyer, having earned her law degree fromFlorida State University and her LL.M. in human rights law from LundUniversity, Sweden. She is a research and editorial associate at FreedomHouse, authored the Iran chapter of Freedom House’s 2009 Freedomin the World, and is a contributing author to the Max Planck Institute’sEncyclopedia of Public International Law.Toby Jones is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University, witha research interest in the Middle East. He earned his PhD from StanfordUniversity and his M.A. and B.A. from Auburn University. In 2003, hewas awarded a Fulbright-Hays scholarship to conduct research in SaudiArabia, Bahrain, and Jordan. He is also the author of the Gulf countryreports for Freedom House’s 2009 Freedom in the World.