Qatar Airways escapes blame for female passengers strip search

Qatar Airways has escaped prosecution in Australia, after a failed attempt to bring a lawsuit against the airline by five women who were forcibly removed from a flight and subjected to invasive physical examinations.

Intimate medicals at gunpoint

In October 2020, the women, aged between 33 and 75 years old, were aboard a Qatar flight due to take off for Sydney from Hamad International Airport when they were ordered to disembark. With no explanation given for what was happening to them, they were taken at gunpoint into ambulances, where they were stripped of their clothes and intimately physically examined.

The reason? A new-born baby had been found abandoned in a bin at the airport and the authorities had decided to hunt down the mother. The five Australians were not the only women examined, but others declined to be a part of the lawsuit.

“I felt like I had been raped,” one British grandmother said of the incident. Another woman said she believed at the time she was being kidnapped and taken hostage. Their lawsuit alleged false imprisonment and “unlawful physical contact” and noted that their mental health had suffered as a result of the experience.

At the time, Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Marise Payne, characterised what had happened to the women as “a grossly disturbing, offensive, concerning set of events”. She added, “It is not something I have ever heard of occurring in my life, in any context. We have made our views very clear to the Qatari authorities.”

In Qatar, a suspended jail term was given to an airport official, and the Prime Minister Khalid bin Khalifa bin Abdulaziz Al Thani expressed his “deepest sympathies”, said he “regretted” the “unacceptable treatment” and described it as outside of Qatar’s laws and values. However, in Australia, the women’s Federal Court filing was dismissed.

Qatar Airways not responsible

Justice John Halley ruled that under the terms of the Montreal Convention that governs airline liability, Qatar Airways could not be considered responsible for what happened to the women, as its staff could not have influenced how the police authorities and medical staff handled the situation. Meanwhile, the Qatari aviation agency is immune from prosecution. But, the judge did allow that a case against Matar, a subsidiary of Qatar Airlines with the operational contract for running Hamad International Airport, could be pursued.

The lawyer acting for the women, Damian Sturzaker, said they would consider options for an appeal in order to force a formal apology and a change in aviation security practices in the Gulf state. “It’s not the end,” Sturzaker said, adding that “the fundamental allegations remain the same: they are that the acts that were committed were illegal.”