Amnesty International launched a new report entitled Predictable and Preventable: Why FIFA and Qatar should remedy abuses behind the 2022 World Cup– today, six months ahead of the tournament’s opening game. In this report, Amnesty International said that FIFA should earmark at least $440m to provide remedy for the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who have suffered human rights abuses in Qatar during preparations for the 2022 World Cup.
In an open letter accompanying the report, Amnesty International and a coalition of human rights organizations, unions, and fan groups urged FIFA’s president Gianni Infantino to work with Qatar to establish a comprehensive remediation programme. As well as providing compensation for all labour abuses related to hosting the tournament in Qatar, they should ensure that abuses are not repeated, both in Qatar and in future tournaments.
Amnesty International is calling on FIFA and Qatar to set up a programme with the full participation of workers, trade unions, the International Labour Organization and civil society. They must also learn from the experiences of other remediation programmes, such as the scheme that followed the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,300 workers lost their lives.
Beyond this tournament, Amnesty International is also calling on FIFA to guarantee that human rights abuses of migrant workers are not repeated, and ensure that the awarding of all future tournaments and events follow a rigorous assessment of risks to human rights along with clear action plans to prevent and mitigate potential abuses identified. New human rights criteria were used in the bidding process for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, but do not appear to have been applied in the decisions to award the 2021 FIFA Club World Cup first to China, then to the United Arab Emirates.
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BACKGROUND
Since 2010, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers have faced human rights abuses while employed to build the stadiums, hotels, transport and other infrastructure necessary to host the 2022 World Cup. The vast majority of migrant workers in Qatar have, for example, paid illegal recruitment fees averaging more than $1,300 per worker to secure their jobs, while before 2020, all were restricted in their ability to change jobs or leave the country. For more information about the human rights abuses faced by migrant workers in Qatar, see here.
Since 2018, Qatar has introduced a series of important labour reforms that aim to improve workers’ rights, but a lack of enforcement means that abuses persist. Improvements for workers on official FIFA sites, such as stadiums, were also introduced in 2014 via the Supreme Committee’s Worker Welfare Standards, but these standards are not universally respected and only cover a minority of the hundreds of thousands of workers on World Cup-related projects. One positive initiative launched by the Supreme Committee in 2018 includes an agreement with contractors on official World Cup sites to reimburse the recruitment fees of 48,000 workers, though this again remains a minority of all workers who have worked on projects essential to the World Cup.
FIFA’s response to Amnesty International’s report is available in the Annex here.