Privacy Policy

1. Data controller details

Owens Mediation & Expatriate Services is a data controller, meaning that it determines the purposes and means of processing your personal data. We are registered in Qatar under commercial registration number 241439. Our contact details are: Signature Msheireb, 2nd Floor, Building 4, Zone #3 Street 983, P.O. Box 39137, Doha, Qatar, yomi@omes.qa. You can also reach us through our Contact Us page.

2. Data protection principles

In relation to your personal data, we will:

• process it fairly, lawfully and in a clear, transparent way
• collect it only for justifiable reasons that have been explained to you
• use it only in the ways we have told you about
• ensure it is accurate and kept up to date
• keep it only for as long as we need it
• process it so that it is not used for anything you are unaware of or have not consented to, and is not lost or destroyed

3. Types of data we process

Our mediation clients, and prospective clients, provide us directly with almost all of the data we process. The only exceptions are:

• when data is provided by solicitors or other professionals, at your request or with your consent
• when someone exploring mediation gives us an email address or other contact details so that we can invite the other person to a meeting to discuss whether mediation might be a way forward

4. Why we process your data

The law on data protection allows us to process your data for certain reasons only:

• in order to perform a contract to which we are party
• in order to carry out legally required duties
• in order to pursue our legitimate interests
• to protect your vital interests
• where something is done in the public interest

All of the processing we carry out falls within one of these permitted reasons.

4.1 People who use our services

Owens Mediation & Expatriate Services offers family mediation. We collect information, including your personal data, so that we can deal effectively with your case or enquiry. We collect only information relevant to the service we are providing; this may include your name, address, telephone number and email address. During mediation you may also provide information about your family or financial circumstances, or about current or previous legal proceedings concerning you and your family. If you contact us with an enquiry, we process that correspondence and the contact details you provide only in order to answer it. The legal basis we rely on is that processing is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests. We do not share information with third parties unless:

• we consider a child to be at significant risk of harm
• you have agreed to a referral to a third party, such as an independent financial adviser

Sometimes you may provide information classed as special category data in the course of using our services. Where that happens we rely on your explicit consent. See section 5 below.

4.2 Visitors to our website

This website is deliberately minimal in what it collects. We set one functional cookie, NEXT_LOCALE, and only when you choose a language with the EN/AR switch. It remembers that choice on later visits. It contains only "en" or "ar", is not used for tracking, and is exempt from consent as a strictly necessary cookie. It is the only cookie this site sets. We use no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies, run no third-party measurement scripts, and therefore ask for no cookie consent. Should that ever change, this notice will be updated and your consent sought before any such cookie is set.

Our hosting provider records standard technical information, including IP address, browser type and the pages requested, in server logs, as part of delivering the site and protecting it from abuse. The legal basis we rely on is our legitimate interest in operating a secure and functioning website. Messages sent through our contact form are delivered to us by email; this website does not store your submission in a database.

4.3 People who make a complaint

If you make a complaint about Owens Mediation & Expatriate Services, we process your personal data in order to progress it. We collect information relevant to the issues you have raised so that we can investigate and resolve the matter. This may include your name, address, telephone number or email address, together with information about the nature and background of the complaint and any correspondence about it. The legal basis we rely on is that processing is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests.

5. Special categories of data

Special categories of data are data relating to your:

• health
• sex life
• sexual orientation
• racial or ethnic origin
• political opinions
• religious or philosophical beliefs

We must process special category data under more stringent conditions, generally where one of the following applies: you have given explicit consent; we must process it to carry out a legal obligation; processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest; or you have already made the data public. We use special category data in order to provide our services to you. We do not need your consent where we process it to carry out a legal obligation, but we may ask for your consent to process particularly sensitive data. If we do, you will be told exactly why. As with any consent, you may give or withhold it, and you may withdraw it at any time without adverse consequence.

6. Criminal conviction data

We will collect criminal conviction data only where it is appropriate to the service we are providing and where the law permits, for instance where it is relevant to your discussions in mediation. We rely on your consent as the lawful basis for processing this data.

7. If you do not provide your data to us

If you do not provide us with the personal data we need, we may be unable to provide some or all of our services. For example, we cannot properly conduct financial mediation without information about the financial circumstances being discussed.

8. Protecting your data

We take the security of your data seriously and have internal processes to ensure that it is not lost, accidentally destroyed, misused or disclosed, and is not accessed other than by those who need it in the proper performance of their duties.

9. How long we keep your data

In line with data protection principles, we keep your data only for as long as it is necessary, which will be at least for the duration of us providing services to you. In some cases we keep data for a period afterwards, where we are under a legal or professional obligation to do so. Our retention periods are: mediation case files for six years after the case closes; where the mediation concerned arrangements for a child, until that child reaches the age of 25; enquiries that do not lead to an engagement for 12 months; and accounting records for ten years.

10. Automated decision making

No decision will be made about you solely on the basis of automated decision making, that is a decision taken by an electronic system without human involvement, which has a significant effect on you.

11. Your rights in relation to your data

The law on data protection gives you certain rights over the data we hold on you:

• The right to be informed: we must tell you how we use your data, which is the purpose of this notice
• The right of access to the data we hold on you
• The right to have any inaccuracies corrected
• The right to have information deleted, where you believe there is no reason for us to continue processing it
• The right to restrict processing, for example while we check that data you believe to be incorrect is accurate
• The right to portability: you may transfer the data we hold on you for your own purposes
• The right to object to processing we carry out in pursuit of our legitimate interests
• The right not to be subject to automated decision making that adversely affects your legal rights

Where you have given consent, you also have the unrestricted right to withdraw it at any time. Withdrawing consent means we will stop processing the data concerned, and may mean we can no longer provide our services to you; in some cases we may continue to use data where we have a separate legitimate reason. To exercise any of these rights, contact us at yomi@omes.qa or through our Contact Us page.

12. Making a complaint

If you believe your data protection rights have been breached, you may complain to the competent supervisory authority. In Qatar, personal data protection under Law No. 13 of 2016 is overseen by the data protection function of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, you may instead complain to your local supervisory authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).