Qatar

Qatar: Six Things You Need to Know About the Hosts of the 2022 FIFA World Cup 

With the 2022 FIFA World Cup kicking off in Qatar on 20 November, the Gulf state will be under the global spotlight. Since FIFA awarded the tournament to Qatar in 2010, the dire situation for migrant workers in the country has been widely publicized. Migrants and domestic workers continue to face a range of abuses including wage theft, forced […]

No ‘Dignity and Pride’ in World Cup Labor Abuses

FIFA Should Uphold Rights Responsibilities to Migrant Workers At a May 2 conference entitled “Managing the Beautiful Game,” FIFA President Gianni Infantino shockingly downplayed deaths and hardships of migrant workers in Qatar who have literally built the 2022 FIFA World Cup. In doing so, he reminded the world that preventable deaths and abuses of migrant workers in […]

As World Cup nears, Qatar and FIFA face fresh scrutiny on press freedom commitments

Exactly one year before the scheduled start of the 2022 football World Cup in Qatar, plainclothes officers from the Gulf state’s Criminal Investigations Department arrested Halvor Ekeland and Lokman Ghorbani, a sports reporter and cameraman respectively for Norwegian state broadcaster NRK, as they were leaving their hotel in the capital of Doha. The NRK journalists […]

10 Questions Journalists Should Ask FIFA and Qatari Authorities About Rights Abuses

When FIFA convenes its 72nd Congress in Doha, Qatar, on March 31, 2022, in preparation for the World Cup, journalists, football associations, fans, and others should press both FIFA officials and Qatari authorities about human rights in the Gulf state, particularly the rights of migrant workers, women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. Since 2010, […]

Qatar: Security guards subjected to forced labour

Security guards in Qatar are working in conditions which amount to forced labour, including on projects linked to the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Amnesty International has found. In a new report, They think that we’re machines, the organization documented the experiences of 34 current or former employees of eight private security companies in Qatar.     The security guards, all migrant […]

Qatar: One Year to Make Good on Promises to Migrant Workers as Progress Stagnates

With just one year to go until the 2022 FIFA World Cup, time is running out for Qatar to deliver on its promise to abolish the kafala sponsorship system and better protect migrant workers, Amnesty International said today. In Reality Check 2021, a new analysis of Qatar’s progress towards overhauling its labour system, the organization found that progress has […]