The Human Rights Watch report has flagged potential human rights issues for migrant workers ahead of the World Cup 2022 build in Qatar.
The Human Rights Watch issued their World Report 2013, the Qatar section of which concentrates heavily on the rights of migrant workers, which will be a major focus as Qatar aims to recruit up to a million additional workers to overhaul infrastructure and build the stadiums necessary for the World Cup in 2022.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), Qatar “has some of the most restrictive sponsorship laws in the Gulf region, and forced labour and human trafficking are serious problems. The government has failed to address shortcomings in the legal and regulatory framework despite the initiation of many large-scale projects in preparation for Qatar hosting the World Cup in 2022.”
There are already over 1.2 million migrant workers in Qatar, mainly from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Nepal, and Bangladesh and they make up 88% of the population and 99% of the private sector workforce.
Although Qatar’s has a law governing labour in the private sector, limiting working hours, requiring paid annual leave, setting out requirements on health and safety, and requiring on-time payment of wages each month it is, according to the human rights organisation, “rarely enforced”.
According to HRW “Passport confiscation is customary and workers typically pay exorbitant recruitment fees, much of which end up in Qatar, according to a 2011 World Bank study on the Nepal-Qatar migration corridor. Migrant workers have no right to unionize or strike.”
The situation has been acknowledged by both FIFA and Qatar and the report in turn acknowledge this saying: “FIFA has pledged to raise worker rights issues with Qatari authorities. However, while Qatar’s World Cup organizing committee publicly said it would establish strict labour standards for contractors hired to build World Cup venues, no such standards appeared to be in place at this writing.”
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