IIn the early hours of Saturday, November 30, Fifa released a heated judgment on Saudi Arabia’s bid 2034 World Cup to host, giving it the joint sum of any nation’s bid and declaring only the risk of human rights to be carried out “medium”.
At the same time, a long-awaited report has been released on whether to compensate migrant workers who suffered severe labor abuses in projects connected with the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Despite a recommendation from its own subcommittee on human rights and social responsibility to do so, Fifa’s response was in effect; a resounding no.
The reports provoked a backlash from human rights groups, which called her out.a wonderful book“and he” “to insult”The harsh language reflects the frustration of human rights organizations that Fifa has learned nothing from Qatar and believes that the gross exploitation of cheap labor will be repeated.
when the The guard it is revealed for the first time The horrific conditions that migrant workers endured in Qatar in 2013 prompted an international outcry. Hundreds of thousands of people from some of the poorest parts of the world have been working in the scorching heat of the desert to build infrastructure and stadiums for the 2022 World Cup.
Testimonies were uncovered by the workers a litany of abuses They faced: passport confiscation, late or non-payment of wages, inhumane living conditions and “sponsorship” that meant they could not change their jobs no matter how they were treated.
Thousands died in the decades leading up to the tournament. It was, many believed, a modern form of slavery in the service of football. And now it’s the bigger turn of Qatar, the bolder neighbor, Saudi Arabia. In his World Cup bidThe Gulf Kingdom has laid out ambitious plans for 11 new stadiums – Qatar has built seven – a huge expansion of transport infrastructure and more than 185,000 new hotel rooms, quadrupling the current number.
Like Qatar, Saudi Arabia’s World Cup infrastructure will be built largely by migrant workers from South Asia. There are more than 13 million foreigners in the country – at least 2 million from Bangladesh alone – and those numbers are expected to rise as construction ramps up in conjunction with the tournament.
For more than a year, human rights groups have warned of the dangers they face, including Amnesty International last month the calls to the control process would stop unless immense corrections are imposed, saying: “The foreign workers will come to be exploited, and many will die.”
Those foreboding warnings are already there. Last month, it was revealed that Bangladeshi workers are building the first new stadium for the stadium World Cup alleged violations of the rights of being subjected to hard labor. Caught up in the summer recruitment, detained for a month’s meager wages, they work in the summer heat for 10-hour shifts, to return each day to squalid, prison-like transport rooms.
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Earlier this year; a The guard investigation found that on average four Bangladeshis die in Saudi Arabia every day – a death toll that is largely untested and unknown.
The Saudi authorities and Fifa He admits that work needs to be done to improve migrant workers, but they argue that – as they did in Qatar – the World Cup will act as a catalyst for change.
The view is not shared by employees who are still in Qatar. “There has been no improvement in the lives of the workers here,” said one.
“People are struggling to find work, many don’t even have money for food.” After the World Cup, every day is worse than the day before.