A senior Qatari official estimates the deaths of employees within the World Cup between 400 and 500
A senior Qatari official concerned within the nation’s World Cup group put the variety of employee deaths on the event at “between 400 and 500” for the primary time, a determine considerably greater than some other determine beforehand provided by Doha.
The remark of Hassan Al-Thawadi, Secretary-Basic of the Supreme Committee for Supply and Legacy in Qatar, seems to have been blown off the dimensions throughout an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan.
It additionally threatened to reinvigorate criticism by human rights teams over the price of internet hosting the primary World Cup within the Center East for migrant employees, who’ve constructed greater than $200 billion in stadiums, metro traces and new infrastructure wanted for the event.
Within the interview, components of which Morgan posted on-line, British journalist Al Thawadi requested: “What’s the trustworthy and factual complete you concentrate on migrant employees who’ve died due to the work they do on the World Cup in its entirety?”
Al-Thawadi replies, “The estimate is round 400, between 400 and 500. I haven’t got the precise quantity. That is one thing that has been mentioned.”
However this determine was not mentioned publicly by Qatari officers beforehand. Reviews from the Supreme Committee relationship from 2014 by the top of 2021 embody solely the variety of deaths of employees concerned within the building and renovation of the stadiums now internet hosting the World Cup.
These launched figures put the full variety of deaths at 40. They embody 37 instances of what Qataris described as non-work-related accidents comparable to coronary heart assaults and three office accidents. One report additionally individually lists the dying of a employee from the coronavirus amid the pandemic.
Al-Thawadi referred to these figures when discussing stadium-only work within the interview, proper earlier than providing the dying toll “between 400 to 500” for all event infrastructure.
In a later assertion, the Supreme Committee mentioned that Al-Thawadi was referring to “nationwide statistics protecting the interval 2014-2020 for all work-related deaths (414) on the state stage in Qatar, and consists of all sectors and nationalities.
Since FIFA awarded the event to Qatar in 2010, the nation has taken some steps to reform the nation’s recruitment practices. This consists of abolishing the so-called kafala system, which ties employees to their employers, who’ve talked about whether or not they can stop their jobs and even go away the nation.
Qatar has additionally adopted a month-to-month minimal wage of 1,000 Qatari riyals ($275) for employees and required meals and housing allowances for workers who don’t obtain these advantages instantly from their employers. It additionally up to date employee security guidelines to stop fatalities.
“One dying is the dying of many. Plain and easy,” Al Thawadi provides within the interview.
Activists have known as on Doha to do extra, significantly in the case of guaranteeing employees are paid on time and defending them from abusive employers.
Al-Thawadi’s remark additionally renews questions in regards to the veracity of each authorities and personal firms’ stories of employee accidents and deaths in Gulf Arab states, whose skyscrapers had been constructed by employees from South Asian international locations comparable to India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
“That is simply the most recent instance of Qatar’s unjustified lack of transparency on employee dying points,” mentioned Nicholas McGeehan of Fairsquare, a London-based group that advocates for migrant employees within the Center East. “We want correct and complete knowledge from investigations, not the imprecise numbers introduced by Media interviews.
“FIFA and Qatar nonetheless have loads of inquiries to reply, not least the place, when and the way these males died and have their households obtained compensation.”
Mostafa Qadri, government director of Equidem Analysis, a labor advisory agency that has revealed stories on building losses on migrant employees, additionally mentioned he was shocked by Thawadi’s comment.
“For him now to say there have been a whole bunch, it is stunning,” he advised the Related Press. “They don’t know what is going on on.”
(AP)
