By Andrew Warshaw
May 18 – Amid reports that a BBC correspondent has become the latest western journalist to be detained in Qatar despite being invited as part of an official tour, fresh calls were made in London today for FIFA’s World Cup sponsors to use their commercial clout to radically improve conditions for thousands of migrant workers employed on construction sites.
The detention of Mark Lobel, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent and his three-man team, while travelling to a labour camp outside Doha, came as pressure groups demanded that FIFA’s partners do more to challenge human rights abuses.
Just as Lobel wrote about his predicament on the BBC’s website and FIFA prepared to issue a reaction to him and his crew being jailed for two days before being released without charge, so the International Trade Union Confederation joined forces with the NewFifaNow movement to demand that World Cup sponsors do more to bring about genuine change in the Gulf state that is hosting the 2022 tournament.
The initiative, dubbed the ‘Hypocrisy World Cup’, is being co-ordinated by sportswear manufacturer SKINS whose chairman Jamie Fuller has written to all FIFA’s top sponsors, so far without reply, urging them to use their power and influence to force FIFA into meaningful action.
Qatar’s World Cup organisers have consistently argued that productive reform is under way internally. But Fuller, recently smuggled into one of the Qatar labour camps, presented graphic and shocking detail, including overflowing faeces and squalid cooking facilities, of the sanitary and living conditions under which migrant workers are employed.
Fuller, whose company has provocatively declared itself ‘Official Non-Sponsor’ of FIFA, insisted he was not calling for a boycott of the World Cup like some – or asking sponsors to pull out.
But he told reporters: “So far FIFA’s sponsors have restricted themselves to a series of rhetorical statements.”
“FIFA’s position is now alarmingly similar to that of the International Olympic Committee in 1999 after the Salt Lake City scandal. On that occasion it was the IOC’s sponsors who enforced wholesale reform and we believe the time is right for FIFA’s sponsors and partners to adopt a similar strategy.”
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