Qatar State Security is the state

intelligence agency An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, public safety, and foreign policy objectives. Means of inf ...

Qatar Qatar (, ; ar, قطر, Qaṭar ; local vernacular pronunciation: ), officially the State of Qatar,) is a country in Western Asia. It occupies the Qatar Peninsula on the northeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East; it sh ...

. It is a branch of the Qatari

Ministry of Interior An interior ministry (sometimes called a ministry of internal affairs or ministry of home affairs) is a government department that is responsible for internal affairs. Lists of current ministries of internal affairs Named "ministry" * Ministry ...

. It was created in 2004, after the General Intelligence Service (Mukhabarat) and the Investigation and State Security Service (mubahith) merged. It performs

internal security Internal security is the act of keeping peace within the borders of a sovereign state or other self-governing territories, generally by upholding the national law and defending against internal security threats. Responsibility for internal secu ...

investigations, gathers

intelligence Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can ...

, and has primary responsibility for

sedition Sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward rebellion against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent toward, or insurrection against, esta ...

and

espionage Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information ( intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tang ...

cases. In June 2017, a former director of the agency accused Qatar of supporting terrorism amid diplomatic tension between Qatar and gulf countries. The intelligence agency has been accused of human rights violations over arbitrary arrests of citizens without court warrants for expressing opinions on social media. On February 7 2022,

Human rights watch Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human ...

drafted a report out which states that the State Security Apparatus Law "does not provide for any judicial oversight over such detention, and the Working Group was informed that in practice, such detention leads to very long periods of deprivation of liberty, in violation of international human rights norms," according to a statement from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention after an official visit to Qatar in 2019. Now, everyone has the freedom to leave any country, including their own, according to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Qatar adopted in 2018. The treaty permits nations to place limitations on that right, provided that they are authorized by law and necessary and reasonable to safeguard the country's security, public order, health, morals, or other rights and freedoms.

References

Law enforcement agencies of Qatar Qatari intelligence agencies 2004 establishments in Qatar {{Qatar-stub