Qatar is facing renewed calls from migrant workers, their families, and rights groups to compensate for human rights abuses including wage theft, injuries and uninvestigated deaths, days before the World Cup kicks off.
As fans and footballers descend on the Persian Gulf country for the month-long tournament, workers and their families, who have spent 12 years sounding the alarm on exploitative conditions endured while building the tournament’s infrastructure, are seeking an amount equivalent to the $440m (£372m) World Cup prize money for a remediation programme.
Qatar’s labour minister, Ali bin Samikh al-Marri, has previously rejected such proposals, telling the news agency AFP that there was “no criteria to establish these funds”.
Faced with scorching temperatures and a lack of labour protections, thousands of workers from Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and elsewhere have died in the host country since the World Cup was awarded 10 years ago.
While the official number of work-related deaths during preparations for the $220bn project is three, according to the Qataris and Gianni Infantino, Fifa’s president, the exact number of migrant workers who have died as a result of negligence remains unknown.
“Many migrant workers, their families and communities are not able to fully celebrate what they have built, and are calling on Fifa and Qatar to remedy abuses of workers that have left families and communities destitute and struggling,” said Rothna Begum, a senior researcher in women’s and migrant rights at Human Rights Watch.
The unsettling human cost of the tournament is acute for workers such as Ram Pukar Sahani, who left Nepal for Qatar with his father, Ganga Sahani, in 2017, to earn money to repay family debts.
In May Ram, who had returned home to get married, received a call from Qatar saying that his father, believed to have been healthy, had died while working.
Ram recalled conversations with his father in which he would complain about his work and said Ram’s job, where he was able to escape to air conditioning and had time to rest, was better.
When Ganga’s body was returned to Nepal, along with his 9,000 Qatari riyal salary and bonus (£2,000) , no further action or compensation came from the company. His father’s death, he said, was attributed to natural causes.
“They are making this a huge event, but I lost my father,” Ram said through a translator on Thursday.
“There is no debt now, but it took my father’s life to pay back that debt,” he said. While the family received insurance money and support from the Nepali government, it wasn’t enough, he added.
Ganga’s death is one of many migrant workers in the past decade that Qatar has failed to investigate, according to an Amnesty International 2021 report that says most migrant worker deaths in Qatar are attributed to “natural causes”, or cardiac or respiratory failure.
In May, Human Rights Watch and other non-governmental organisations wrote a joint open letter to Fifa’s president, calling on the sports body and Qatari authorities to remedy past labour abuses and to compensate workers and their families.
Earlier this month, 10 European footballing nations demanded that Fifa deliver a permanent workers’ rights centre in Qatar and a compensation fund for migrant workers and their families. On Sunday, Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, made an urgent plea for compensation to help families rebuild their lives.
To quell mounting criticism, sweeping labour reforms were introduced in 2019, which included ending kafala, the system that made it illegal for migrant workers to change jobs or leave the country without their employer’s permission. Other reforms included the first minimum wage for migrant workers in the region and harsher penalties for companies that did not comply with the new laws.
“This is because of our blood and sweat,” said Ram of the tournament, which starts in three days. “Look at us, see our conditions, because there are so many people who have made a huge contribution, even losing their life, to make Qatar’s World Cup possible.”
The Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee was approached for comment.
