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.
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 labourers, 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 labourers 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 alleges that while the organising 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 labour-supply company “appear to have been subjected to forced labour”.
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