Despite five years of growing criticism, Fifa and the Qatari authorities have been accused of ongoing indifference towards systemic abuse and appalling treatment of migrant workers working on stadiums that will host the 2022 World Cup.
A damning new report by Amnesty International, which interviewed 132 contractors working on refurbishing the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha and a further 102 landscapers who work in the Aspire Zone sports complex that surrounds it, claimed that they all reported human rights abuses of one kind or another.
The findings will prove controversial because Qatars Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy has made ensuring minimum standards are met on World Cup stadium projects a priority in the wake of widespread criticism of the broader conditions in which migrant labourers, who make up more than 90% of Qatars 2.1m population, live and work.
For the first time, Amnesty said it had definitively identified mistreatment and abuses on a World Cup stadium site rather than on infrastructure projects that underpin Qatars ambitious 2030 Vision, of which the football tournament has become an integral part.
It said that workers refurbishing the Khalifa stadium, scheduled to host one of the World Cup semi-finals in 2022, reported they were forced to live in squalid accommodation, appeared to pay huge recruitment fees, and have had wages withheld and passports confiscated. Amnesty conducted the interviews during three visits over the course of a year from February 2015.
Qatari law prohibits retention of passports, delayed payment of wages or deceptive recruitment (where workers are promised a certain wage in their country of origin only to be paid less when they arrive). But Amnesty found evidence that all of those practices remained widespread during the period in question.