Human rights violations of foreign labor in Qatar exacerbate: HRW

CAIRO – 22 July 2017: Human Rights Watch on Friday reiterated its condemnation of the blatant violations of rights of the migrants working in the sites of the 2022 World Cup scheduled to be held in Qatar.

In December 2010, the small emirate of Qatar won a bid to host the 2022 World Cup.
In its World 2017 report, Human Rights Watch argued that the foreign laborers, primarily coming from Asia and Africa, face non-payment and delay-in-payment of wages and other violations by their employers, including passport confiscations.

The migrant-worker-dependant Qatar enforces a brutally exploitative “kafala” or sponsors law, the report stated, adding that 2016 amendments added to the law made it more abusive. Amendments included “enabling employers to arbitrarily prevent their employees from leaving Qatar and returning to their home country.”

The report also touched on Qatar’s labor law, which “prohibits migrant workers from unionizing or engaging in strikes, although they make up 99 percent of the private sector workforce,” criminalizes foreign workers’ participation in labor strikes, denying them of their freedom of association and their right to stand up for themselves.

In its 2012 report titled “Building a Better World Cup: Protecting Migrant Workers in Qatar Ahead of FIFA 2022”, Human Rights Watch raised an alarm of the same set of concerns regarding the violations faced by foreign labor in Qatar.

"If the system in Qatar doesn't change, then every man, woman and child who goes to the World Cup is likely to meet a migrant worker who is exploited," Audrey Gaughran, Amnesty's director of global issues and research, told CNN in a report released in March 2016, in coincidence with Amnesty’s reports regarding the same matter.

"The abuse of migrant workers is a stain on the conscience of world football," Amnesty International General Secretary Salil Shetty said in Amnesty’s press release.

“The start of 2014 there was no problem; I was getting my monthly pay and sending back money to my wife to cover my (recruitment) loan and the rent for our house (in Nepal)," a metal worker named Prem told Amnesty. "We also look after my parents."
Amnesty laid down Prem’s family suffering, as they haven’t been able to meet up their financial obligations and ended up losing their house.

"My family is now homeless and two of my younger children have been taken out of school," he said. "My parents had to shift to my brother's house in our village, but it is far and there are no facilities there.

"Every day I am in tension; I cannot sleep at night. This is a torture for me," Prem told Amnesty.