London: An international human rights group has cataloged alleged human rights abuses in Qatar in connection to construction projects for the 2022 World Cup, and called on Fifa to ensure the exploitation of migrant workers ends.
In a report published on Sunday, Amnesty International warned that migrant workers in the tiny Gulf nation are exposed to dangerous working conditions, poor standards of accommodation and the non-payment of wages.
“It is simply inexcusable in one of the richest countries in the world, that so many migrant workers are being ruthlessly exploited, deprived of their pay and left struggling to survive,“ Amnesty International Secretary General Salil Shetty said in a statement.
Amnesty's study comes a week after Fifa President Sepp Blatter visited the emir of Qatar to share Fifa's concern about working conditions after newspaper investigations highlighted alleged human rights abuses and deaths in the extreme heat.
There have been longstanding concerns about the lack of safeguards for the mainly South Asian migrant laborers in Qatar and across the Gulf, including lowgrade housing and employers withholding the worker passports.
“Our findings indicate an alarming level of exploitation in the construction sector in Qatar,“ Shetty said. “Fifa has a duty to send a strong public message that it will not tolerate human rights abuses on construction projects related to the World Cup.“
Fifa wrote to Amnesty to express hopes that by taking the World Cup to the Middle East for the first time it can be the catalyst for social change, including an “improvement of labour rights and conditions for migrant workers.“
Amnesty did say that the labour rights adopted by World Cup organisers themselves could “potentially serve as a positive model for other developers in Qatar,“ but expressed fears that other projects -such as major infrastructure work like building roads and railways -won't adopt those standards.
