Might be good to mention that Qatar Airways are the same airline being sued by multiple women after being subjected to invasive body searches:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/21/austr...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/21/austr...
> Women on 10 flights, including five Australians who were on a Sydney-bound Qatar Airways flight, were removed from planes at gunpoint and taken into ambulances on the tarmac.
> Some were instructed to remove their underwear and some were forced to submit to invasive gynaecological examinations for evidence they had recently given birth.
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My original comment is above, as many replies indicate, I did not include the context, which is:
> women on planes on the ground at Doha, including 13 Australians, were subjected to the examinations as authorities searched for the mother of a newborn baby found abandoned in a plastic bag in the departures lounge at Hamad international airport.
I apologize for not providing the full context.
> On 2 October 2020, women on planes on the ground at Doha, including 13 Australians, were subjected to the examinations as authorities searched for the mother of a newborn baby found abandoned in a plastic bag in the departures lounge at Hamad international airport.
Does the (real or perceived) need for immediacy justify the incredible level of invasiveness of this mass surveillance?
So while I find the methods questionable, I also accept there is merit in pursuing methods that can give reasonable evidence towards an arrest now before the mother can high tail it.
Immediacy is definitely warrented. I'm unsure if the invasiveness is, but obviously a 24 hour+ process isn't viable.
"mass surveillance" this is not; invasive - absolutely.
What you're proposing, if I was a woman (I am not) to be searched is instead i have to give up my DNA to have them store on record in case I was the person who abandoned the newborn.
That's much closer to "mass surveillance" than a body search.
If given the choice, I would give the body search 100%.
How so? I'm imagining they're intending to detain and investigate indiscriminately every woman of child-bearing age in the airport and on flights that recently boarded. That seems to meet the definition to me.
They can't keep doing it, that's the biggest part it stops.
Mass surveillance has a definition[0].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#:~:text=Ma....
Yes!
> If there was a murderer loose would you let the suspects fly out?
Absent any probable cause (or even articulable specific suspicion) against a particular individual? Yes!
If someone is murdered by a woman in my city, we don’t detain all women.
I get that Qatar doesn’t have the US Fourth Amendment (and perhaps no enumeration of rights of the people), but this behavior would be considered absurd (ly unconstitutional) here.
And they found the mother so seems like it worked.
There isn't if you're looking for a fast answer.
> women on planes on the ground at Doha, including 13 Australians, were subjected to the examinations as authorities searched for the mother of a newborn baby found abandoned in a plastic bag in the departures lounge at Hamad international airport.
While I personally don't think this justifies their actions, I do think it matters that this was not a completely random "let's inspect some vaginas".
The airline and the cou try have lost my business forever because of the incident. We have had 4 trips of 6 people where this is one of the main stops on a possible route, and I've actively avoided booking that route because I don't believe in su jecting the women of my family to the particular injustices I believe were committed here.
I also believe the local authority figures who completed this search were later fired.