Amnesty: Migrant workers suffer 'appalling treatment' in Qatar World Cup stadiums

Despite five years of growing criticism, Fifa and the Qatari authorities have been accused of ongoing indifference towards systemic abuse and “appalling treatment” of migrant workers working on stadiums that will host the 2022 World Cup, the BBC reported.

A damning new report by Amnesty International, which interviewed 132 contractors working on refurbishing the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha and a further 102 landscapers who work in the Aspire Zone sports complex that surrounds it, claimed that they all reported human rights abuses of one kind or another.

The findings will prove controversial because Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy has made ensuring minimum standards are met on World Cup stadium projects a priority in the wake of widespread criticism of the broader conditions in which migrant laborers, who make up more than 90% of Qatar’s 2.1m population, live and work.

For the first time, Amnesty said it had definitively identified mistreatment and abuses on a World Cup stadium site rather than on infrastructure projects that underpin Qatar’s ambitious 2030 Vision, of which the football tournament has become an integral part.

It said that workers refurbishing the Khalifa stadium, scheduled to host one of the World Cup semi-finals in 2022, reported they were forced to live in squalid accommodation, appeared to pay huge recruitment fees, and have had wages withheld and passports confiscated. Amnesty conducted the interviews during three visits over the course of a year from February 2015.

Qatari law prohibits retention of passports, delayed payment of wages or deceptive recruitment (where workers are promised a certain wage in their country of origin only to be paid less when they arrive). But Amnesty found evidence that all of those practices remained widespread during the period in question.

The number of laborers working directly on World Cup stadiums increased from 2,000 to 4,000 in the past year and is expected to grow to 36,000 in the next two years.

The Amnesty report said while the organizing committee has introduced welfare standards there are “significant gaps in application” and its efforts have been undermined by indifference from Fifa and apathy from the Qatari authorities.

The stadium is part of the lavish Aspire Zone sports complex where Bayern Munich, Everton and Paris Saint-Germain trained this winter. The Welsh rugby team trained there before last year’s World Cup.

Of the men interviewed, Amnesty’s report found that the vast majority alleged they had their passports confiscated, 88 had been denied the right to leave Qatar, many reported their wages being paid three or four months in arrears and there was evidence that some workers on the stadium contracted to a labor-supply company “appear to have been subjected to forced labor”.

It said that there was evidence of workers being threatened with non-payment of wages, being deported or – conversely – not being allowed to leave Qatar because their employer would not provide an exit permit.

It claimed all the men interviewed had taken out loans to pay for recruitment-related fees, often to agencies in their home country. The practice is forbidden by Qatari law but remains widespread.

Amnesty concluded that the human rights abuses it documented were the result of “multiple failures” and that while there had been a belated focus on the quality of workers’ accommodation by some of the companies involved, they have done little to address other well-documented issues such as deception in the recruitment process.

Qatar’s 2022 supreme committee said it had called for an “immediate and comprehensive review of the application and enforcement” of its workers’ welfare standards among all contractors, sub-contractors and labour supply companies.

In a statement it said that it is “committed to ensuring the health, safety and well-being of every worker on World Cup projects”, that “the tone of Amnesty International’s latest assertions paint[s] a misleading picture” and “the conditions reported were not representative of the entire work force on Khalifa”.

The supreme committee argued that Amnesty focused on just four of the 40 companies that work on the stadium and that many of the problems identified by the NGO had already been rectified by the time it approached it with the findings some months later.

Source: MENA