Fifa faces calls to quash Qatar World Cup vote after corruption allegations
Senior football figures considering response if investigation into leaked documents leads to recommendation of revote
Senior Fifa figures are for the first time seriously considering the ramifications of ordering a rerun of the vote for the right to stage the 2022 World Cup, in the aftermath of new corruption allegations against the hosts,Qatar.
While awaiting the results of a semi-independent inquiry into the 2018 and 2022 bidding races, senior football figures heading for the 2014 tournament in Brazil are understood to be considering their response if the report recommends a new vote in light of new claims based on hundreds of millions of leaked emails and documents.
The Qatari organising committee for the 2022 World Cup is to meet Fifa investigator Michael Garcia on Monday in Oman, the BBC reports.
When Sepp Blatter President of Fifa announced that Qatar had won the right to host the 2022 World Cup there was genuine surprise, given the other bids by South Korea and Japan among others. Since then human rights groups and various media outlets have shown a light on the abuses visited upon the migrant workers from South Asia.
Qatar Announces Labor Law Reforms Ahead Of World Cup, But Will Anything Change?
At a highly anticipated announcement Wednesday, Qatari officials announced what they said were sweeping changes to the system, though they offered no time table for the implementation of the reforms. The country will abolish thekafala system if a draft law is approved, according to The Guardian, ending the sponsorship system that directly ties workers to their employers. It will replace it with a contractual employment system, the government said, which should give workers more rights to change jobs. The proposed reforms also increase fines on employers who do not pay workers proper wages in a timely manner, and Qatar will attempt to implement an electronic payment system to make compensation practices more transparent.In an interview with Al Jazeera, FIFA's secretary-general, Jerome Valcke, said that while FIFA was supporting talks between Qatar and some unions, it could not be held responsible for issues that were not under FIFA's umbrella."FIFA is not a United Nations. FIFA is about sport," Valcke said.
"We can't tell a country what should be their foreign policy. That's not our role. It's unfair if we get pressure from the rest of the world saying 'hey FIFA, that's what's happening in that country and you have to change the way the country behaves.
"We can tell the country it goes against FIFA's rules, it goes against FIFA's ethics codes. It goes against FIFA''s principle. And we can help and change. But we cannot be seen as responsible for what's happening in different countries."
From the Los Angeles Times
The Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, flush with oil riches and seeking to push its way to the front of the international stage, is in the midst of an enormous, decade-long building boom to construct facilities and infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup soccer tournament, the largest and most-viewed sporting event in the world. Unfortunately, Qatar is preparing for that moment of international cooperation and sport by grievously exploiting its foreign workers, subjecting them to dangerous conditions that should be drawing forceful condemnations from the world community.
A report last week by the government of India, which supplies a large share of Qatar's workers, suggests that more than 500 of its citizens have died there since 2012, primarily, according to the Guardian, in either on-site accidents or from working in inhumane conditions. Nepal, another big supplier of Qatar's labor force, recorded the deaths of 383 Nepali workers in that country in 2012-13.
International observers and human rights groups have described working conditions for foreign laborers in Qatar as intolerable and inhumane, citing dangerous work sites, confiscations of passports by employers, withheld wages, oppressively overcrowded worker dormitories and limited access to food and water despite 12-hour work shifts often in triple-digit temperatures. Although conditions are difficult for foreign workers in many gulf countries, Amnesty International notes that Qatar is different because of its unusual exit permit system — under which foreign nationals can't leave the country without permission from their employers — its ban on unions and the sheer size of its foreign labor force.
Qatar's World Cup preparations shouldn't include abusing its workers
The Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, flush with oil riches and seeking to push its way to the front of the international stage, is in the midst of an enormous, decade-long building boom to construct facilities and infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup soccer tournament, the largest and most-viewed sporting event in the world. Unfortunately, Qatar is preparing for that moment of international cooperation and sport by grievously exploiting its foreign workers, subjecting them to dangerous conditions that should be drawing forceful condemnations from the world community.
A report last week by the government of India, which supplies a large share of Qatar's workers, suggests that more than 500 of its citizens have died there since 2012, primarily, according to the Guardian, in either on-site accidents or from working in inhumane conditions. Nepal, another big supplier of Qatar's labor force, recorded the deaths of 383 Nepali workers in that country in 2012-13.
International observers and human rights groups have described working conditions for foreign laborers in Qatar as intolerable and inhumane, citing dangerous work sites, confiscations of passports by employers, withheld wages, oppressively overcrowded worker dormitories and limited access to food and water despite 12-hour work shifts often in triple-digit temperatures. Although conditions are difficult for foreign workers in many gulf countries, Amnesty International notes that Qatar is different because of its unusual exit permit system — under which foreign nationals can't leave the country without permission from their employers — its ban on unions and the sheer size of its foreign labor force.
No comments:
Post a Comment