Your Employer Is Holding Your Passport: What Gulf Law Actually Says

You arrived, you handed over your passport for the residence visa, and it never came back. Or it came back and then was taken again “for safekeeping”, or “because the hospital keeps all staff passports”, or because you signed something at induction you were not given time to read. Every nurse this happens to reaches the same conclusion within about a week: I cannot leave.

That conclusion is wrong, and it is wrong in two separate ways that are worth separating. Holding your passport is prohibited in all six of the countries this site covers. And noneof those six requires a private-sector nurse to have her employer’s permission to leave the country. You are not legally trapped. You are administratively obstructed, and obstruction has a published remedy in every one of these jurisdictions.

The one-line answer, per country

The ban is close to universal. What differs — and what actually matters when you are deciding what to do on a Tuesday afternoon — is which kind of law it lives in, because that decides who enforces it and which door you knock on.

Two of the six — Qatar and Oman — allow the employer to keep the document with your written consent. In the other four, consent is irrelevant: a signature does not make a prohibited act lawful. So “but I signed something” is a real question in Doha and Muscat, and a non-question in Dubai, Riyadh, Manama and Kuwait City. In Qatar it also has a limit — see below.

UAE: the article is broader than the passport

Three other pages on this site quote u.ae’s summary line, which is accurate and worth knowing: “The confiscation of workers’ passports is prohibited and workers do not require their employer’s permission to leave the country.” But the underlying article says something more useful. Article 13 of Federal Decree-Law No. (33) of 2021 lists the employer’s obligations, and clause 2 is:

“Not withholding the official documents of the worker or forcing him to leave the State at the end of the employment relationship.”

Official documents, not passport. For a nurse that difference is the whole point, because the document most often held back is not the passport at all. It is the degree certificate original, the transcript, the registration certificate from home, or the experience certificate — the exact set that DataFlow needs, and the exact set a nurse discovers is missing at the worst possible moment, when she is applying somewhere better. Article 13(2) covers those.

u.ae publishes a toll-free Labour Claims and Advisory Call Centre on 80084, and a set of online complaint services for private-sector employees, free-zone employees and salary complaints separately. Advice is not a complaint — you may call and ask what your options are without filing anything, and that is usually the right first move.

Saudi Arabia: it is not in the Labour Law, and the blogs have it wrong

Search this question and you will be told, repeatedly and confidently, that the Saudi rule is “Article 20 of the Labour Law”. It is not. Article 20 of the Labor Law (Royal Decree M/51) was read at source for this page and it is the general abuse-of-rights clause:

“An employer or a worker may not perform any act that may abuse the provisions of this Law or the decisions or regulations issued for its implementation. Neither of them may undertake any act that infringes upon the freedom of the other…”

A real clause, and arguably relevant in spirit, but it says nothing about passports and it is not what anyone means when they cite it. The actual instrument sits outside the Labour Law: the ILO’s December 2023 brief attributes the prohibition and its fine to Council of Ministers Decision No. 166/1421 (2000), Regulating Relations between Migrant Workers and Their Employers, with the penalty later increased by a 2019 ministerial order amending the Labour Law Implementing Regulations. The same brief records a fine of SAR 5,000 as at December 2023. Treat that as a figure with a date on it, not a current one — Saudi penalty schedules have been revised in both directions since.

This matters practically: if you complain to MHRSD citing “Article 20”, you are citing the wrong document. Describe the conduct instead and let the ministry name the instrument. It is the same failure mode as the IELTS 4.5 figure quoted at Saudi nurses — a genuine clause, applied at the wrong place.

Qatar: consent is allowed, but it is revocable

Qatar is the country where the paperwork you signed genuinely changes the answer, and also the country where it changes it least permanently. The rule is in the immigration statute, not the labour one: Law No. 21 of 2015 Regulating the Entry, Exit and Residence of Expatriates. Per the ILO brief, Article 8 lets an employer keep the passport onlywith the worker’s written consent — and requires it to be returned on request. Article 33 attaches the penalty, recorded by the ILO at up to QAR 25,000 as at December 2023.

So the consent is not a waiver of the right; it is a permission you can withdraw. “I am requesting the return of my passport”, in writing, ends the lawful basis for holding it. Qatar also requires employers to provide lockable personal storage that the worker can reach at any time, which tells you what the law thinks the alternative to employer custody is supposed to be.

And no, they cannot stop you leaving

Exit permits are gone for the overwhelming majority of workers. The remaining exception is capped at 5 per cent of an establishment’s workforce and, per the ILO brief, is limited to chief executive and financial officers, the director supervising daily operations, and the ICT director. A staff nurse is not on that list. If you are prevented from leaving for any reason, there is an Expatriates’ Exit Appeals Committee that issues a decision within three working days.

Bahrain: this one is a police matter

Bahrain is the outlier and the reason this page is a table rather than a paragraph. The ILO brief cites the prohibition to Article 395 of the Bahrain Penal Code — not the Labour Law. That changes the door. A labour complaint to the Individual Labour Disputes Settlement Authority at the Ministry of Labour is the route for a contractual dispute; conduct defined by the Penal Code is a matter for the police. Bahrain also publishes a line for reporting worker exploitation and trafficking — 995 inside Bahrain — which exists precisely because these cases sometimes are not ordinary labour disputes.

We have not read Article 395 at source and do not quote it, and we take no view on what conduct crosses which line. If you are in Bahrain and your documents are being withheld, this is the country on the list where it is most worth getting actual legal advice rather than filing a form.

Oman and Kuwait

Oman.The Labour Law promulgated by Royal Decree 53 of 2023 — the new one, which replaced the 2003 law — prohibits an employer from keeping the worker’s passport or identity documents except with the worker’s written permission, at Article 6. Like Qatar, a consent regime. No exit permit is required to leave.

Kuwait. The instrument is Ministerial Decision No. 166 of 2007 Concerning the Prohibition of Confiscating Travel Documents of Workers in the Private Sector, reinforced by Ministerial Decision No. 2194 of 2016. Note the title: Kuwait issued a decision whose entire subject is this problem, which is not what a government does about a rare one. Disputes are lodged at a local Public Authority for Manpower office; a PAM investigator mediates, and if there is no settlement within a month the case is referred to the Civil Court’s Labour Circuit. No exit permit is required.

What the passport does not control: your licence

This is the part no general-purpose article will tell you, and it is the reason to read this on a nursing site rather than an expat forum.

Your professional file does not live in your passport. Your DataFlow report, your Good Standing Certificate, your Sheryan record, your Mumaris+ or QCHP file, your exam result — all of it sits with the authority, under your own account, keyed to your name and passport number. An employer holding the physical booklet does not hold any of that, cannot revoke it, and cannot see it. If you have already passed the exam, you have already passed it.

What the booklet does block is real but narrow, and mostly immigration-shaped: leaving the country, a new residence visa, and any step where an authority or test centre needs to see the original rather than a copy. Most licensing steps run on scanned copies — the document checklist is a list of uploads. So keep a clear scan of every page of your passport, and of your Emirates ID or QID or iqama, from the day you arrive. It costs nothing and it removes most of the leverage.

What to actually do

In rough order, and stopping wherever the problem resolves. Nothing here is urgent enough to skip a step — and skipping to the last one is the mistake that turns a document problem into a much worse one.

• Ask in writing, once, plainly. An e-mail to HR requesting the return of your passport and any other original documents, kept in your own inbox. In Qatar and Oman this also withdraws any consent you gave. Everywhere it creates the date the request was made, which is the fact everything later turns on.
• Ask what the actual reason is.Some retentions are a genuine in-progress visa or medical step and the document comes back in a fortnight. Ask which process, and when it completes. A specific answer is a good sign; “company policy” is not one.
• Call the advisory line before you file anything.The UAE’s is 80084. Advice is free and filing is a separate decision; you are allowed to understand your position first.
• Check the rest of the relationship. Document retention very rarely arrives alone. If your salary is also late, the UAE starts a clock on it — see the unpaid-salary guide. If you are being rostered outside your scope, that is its own problem and its own article.
• File, through the published route.MOHRE in the UAE, MHRSD in Saudi Arabia, the Ministry of Labour’s unified complaints platform in Qatar, the Ministry of Labour in Bahrain, PAM in Kuwait. Describe the conduct and the dates; do not cite an article number you have not read.
• Do not simply stop turning up. This is the one that costs nurses years. An absconding report is far easier for an employer to file than it is for you to reverse, and in the UAE a worker who has already filed a labour complaint is in a materially different position from one who has not. Complain first, leave second. The order is the protection.

And if what you are really deciding is whether to resign, that is a different page with different clocks — the UAE notice and gratuity guide and the Saudi final exit guide.

Sources

• Federal Decree-Law No. (33) of 2021on assets.u.ae — Article 13(2) (official documents) and Article 65(1) (minimum rights). Marked “This is NOT an official translation”.
• u.ae — Labour rights — the passport and permission-to-leave statement, and the 80084 Labour Claims and Advisory Call Centre.
• Labor Law, Royal Decree M/51 on hrsd.gov.sa — Article 20, quoted to show what it does not say.
• Absher — the Saudi portal a worker uses to apply for her own exit and re-entry or final exit visa.
• ILO FAIRWAY, Regulatory framework governing migrant workers, country briefs updated December 2023 — UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait. Secondary sources; every instrument, article number, penalty figure and exit-permit position above that is not separately sourced comes from these.

Rules and penalties change. Confirm anything you are relying on with the ministry named for your country before you act on it.