Football associations should not stay silent on Saudi Arabia hosting the World Cup 2034 out of “political convenience”, Amnesty International has said.
The Middle East nation is the sole bidder to stage the finals in 12 years’ time at a Fifa Congress next week, with football’s global governing body having combined the decision on the 2030 and 2034 hosts into one vote.
The British FAs are yet to offer any public or private indication of where they stand or how they will vote, and the Norwegian federation’s president Lise Klaveness is one of very few who have spoken out against the process Fifa has followed.
A number of associations did challenge Fifa over compensation to migrants working in Qatar and on other issues related to the 2022 finals, but Steve Cockburn, the head of labour rights and sport at Amnesty International, is concerned at what he has seen from them so far this time.
“There has been a deafening silence (on Saudi Arabia) with a few exceptions,” he said at a virtual briefing organised by the Sport and Rights Alliance on Wednesday.
“We find this very disappointing. There were a number of FAs speaking out quite strongly in Qatar and were good allies for a period in terms of calling for justice and compensation.
“It’s really important to hold firm to those values when it becomes more difficult as well. They can’t be dropped when it becomes politically convenient.”
Saudi Arabia’s bid was handed a record score in a Fifa evaluation report published late last Friday night and deemed ‘medium risk’ for human rights.
Amnesty described the report as an “astonishing whitewash” and has warned migrant workers will die in preparing the country for hosting the finals.
Human Rights Watch has obtained data for a report published on Wednesday from the Bangladeshi government, which found 887 migrant workers from the south Asian country had died in Saudi Arabia between January and July of this year alone. Eighty per cent of those deaths were attributed to “natural causes”.
Similarly, according to the Nepal government, 590 out of 870 Nepali migrant worker deaths over a three-year period between mid-2019 and mid-2022 in Saudi Arabia were attributed to natural causes.
In June, Building and Wood Workers International (BWI) filed two separate formal complaints about Saudi Arabia to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), related to allegations of severe human rights abuses and wage theft involving at least 21,000 construction workers.
Cockburn believes the process Fifa has followed has also contributed to what he sees as a reluctance among national associations to speak out.
“The process has increased the cost for dissent,” he added. “The fact there is an unopposed process, I think, is at the heart of many of the problems that we face. There’s no real suggestion that there’s any alternative to the bids. And therefore people might look at this and say, ‘what’s the point in speaking out?”’
PA
