MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 12th December, 2022) FIFA has not acted on its promise to ensure compensation for migrant workers who died or had their human rights violated when preparing the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar, a group of human rights organizations said on Monday.
FIFA has on multiple occasions committed to addressing deaths, injuries, harassment and underpayment that migrant workers endured preparing the global football championship in Qatar. Last month, it announced a new Legacy Fund, but rights organizations say it includes no provision for workers' compensation. The group includes Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, FairSquare and Equidem.
"Instead of ensuring protection of migrant workers who built and delivered the World Cup infrastructure in Qatar, FIFA has benefited from their exploitation and parroted Qatari authorities' talking points, showing their complicity to all the misleading claims and deflections on abuses of migrant workers," the founding director at FairSquare, Nick McGeehan, said.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino has suggested family members of migrant workers who died working on FIFA World Cup 2022 seek compensation from a special Qatari government fund, but the Qatari authorities attribute most migrant worker deaths to "natural causes" or "cardiac arrest," which makes family members ineligible for compensation, the rights groups said.
"FIFA's egregious whitewashing of serious abuses against migrant workers in Qatar is both a global embarrassment and a sinister tactic to escape its human rights responsibility," the acting executive director at Human Rights Watch, Tirana Hassan, said.
Despite the fact that FIFA will reportedly earn $7.5 billion from the 2022 World Cup, it demonstrates reluctance to use these funds for compensating affected migrants, the report said.
Human rights watchdogs urged FIFA to use its newly announced Legacy Fund to fulfill its human rights responsibilities.
