FIFA Abandons Rights Policies to Enable Saudis to Host Tournament
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(New York) – Saudi Arabia’s World Cup bid fails to address the country’s widespread labor rights abuses, Human Rights Watch said today.
FIFA, the international football organization, will formally certify the awarding of the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia on December 11, 2024. FIFA has reportedly completed its evaluation of the Saudi bid. On July 29, Saudi authorities submitted their “bid book” alongside a Human Rights Strategy and an Independent Context Assessment, which are FIFA bidding requirements. All three documents blatantly ignore well-documented risks workers face, including forced labor. They also lack any analysis of enforcement gaps and don’t include perspectives of rightsholders and other stakeholders beyond Saudi government officials.
“Saudi Arabia’s FIFA World Cup hosting documents ignore the country’s egregious human rights violations, including inadequate heat protections, unchecked wage theft, the ban on labor unions and an abusive kafala (visa sponsorship) labor system,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch. “FIFA is willfully blind to the country’s human rights record, setting up a decade of potentially horrific human rights abuses preparing for the 2034 World Cup.”
Saudi Arabia’s hosting documents shed light on the immense scale of construction required for the tournament, including 11 new and refurbished stadiums. Additional infrastructure to be built includes more than 185,000 new hotel rooms and significant airport, road, rail, and bus network expansion, as well as the giga-projects under the Saudi Vision 2030 plan, including the new upscale NEOM city.
By comparison, no new stadiums will be built for the 2026 World Cup in the US, Canada, and Mexico. Saudi Arabia’s massive infrastructure deficit will rest entirely on the backs of migrant workers building it. The country has 13.4 million migrant workers, according to the 2022 census, accounting for 42 percent of the country’s population.
In June, the Building and Wood Workers’ International Union (BWI) filed a forced labor complaint against Saudi Arabia at the International Labour Organization (ILO). BWI’s complaint was based on cases of tens of thousands of workers with unpaid wages from two Saudi-based construction companies and testimony from 193 migrant workers who have faced a range of abuses. Violations included confiscation of identity documents, debt bondage, and abusive working and living conditions despite Saudi authorities’ claim of Labor Law revisions. BWI’s complaint cites Saudi Arabia’s failure to enforce several international treaties it has ratified, including the Forced Labour Convention and its 2014 protocol.
Despite the indispensable role of migrant workers for the 2034 World Cup, the government’s bid documents fail to meaningfully prioritize key labor protections.
The Independent Context Analysis commissioned by the Saudi Arabia Football Federation (SAFF) in consultation with FIFA and conducted by the law firm AS&H Clifford Chance is embarrassingly inadequate. The assessment itself acknowledges they did not carry out the due diligence required in FIFA’s own human rights policy, and that the reporting scope is limited to 22 human rights instruments selected by FIFA and SAFF and what was “feasible within the assessment time frame and FIFA’s prescribed page limit.” This excludes bedrock international human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The bibliography also omits references to extensive published research on migrant worker rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and a major forced labor complaint against the country.
A coalition of 11 leading human rights monitoring organizations including Human Rights Watch laid out severe concerns about the Clifford Chance assessment in a letter that warned FIFA and the law firm that they are at risk of being linked to abuses in the tournament preparations. In response, the law firm said it would be “inappropriate” to offer any comment.
“Not a single migrant worker, victim of human rights crimes, torture survivor, jailed women’s rights advocate, or Saudi civil society member was consulted for FIFA’s supposedly independent report,” Worden said. “FIFA’s treatment of the Saudi bid is an abysmal failure to implement mandatory human rights risk assessments and protections for the millions of migrant workers who are going to make the 2034 World Cup possible.”
The other key bid document, the “Human Rights Strategy in connection with the 2034 FIFA World Cup,” falsely refers to the Independent Context Analysis as a “robust human rights context risk assessment” based on “robust engagement with relevant stakeholders in the Kingdom to examine current policies and regulations, and identify salient risks and gaps associated with preparing and hosting the tournament.”
The authors make clear, though, that its analysis, over a six-week period, was based on desk research and engagement solely with Saudi authorities. Similarly, the Saudi Bid Book refers to the Clifford Chance assessment as “focused on the rights topics that are commonly associated with mega sporting events, taking account of published commentary by international monitoring bodies and supported by robust engagement with stakeholders across Saudi Arabia.”
The Human Rights Strategy also lists “additional initiatives” such as developing frameworks to perform supplier due diligence as well as procurement and supply chain management that are not specific, concrete, or time bound. They don’t mention core labor rights such as freedom of association and collective bargaining. This vagueness reflects Saudi Arabia’s lack of readiness to adequately protect workers in the high-risk environment of massive construction projects for the World Cup.
“These documents were apparently cooked up together to create the impression that a serious human rights and labor rights risk assessment has been done,” Worden said. “FIFA’s fake evaluation process to award the 2034 World Cup without legally binding human rights commitments is a replay of its irresponsible approach to building the World Cup in Qatar, which ultimately cost thousands of migrant workers their lives.”
Human Rights Watch has warned that FIFA is breaking its own human rights rules in announcing a plan for hosting the next two men’s World Cups that effectively eliminates bidding and human rights due diligence. The bid process for the 2026 World Cup was required to include a human rights strategy and an independent assessment, which was based on consultations with dozens of human rights stakeholders. Human Rights Watch wrote to FIFA detailing concerns regarding the 2034 bid book and has informed sponsors including Coca-Cola, Adidas, and AB InBev about the flawed human rights risk assessments.
The 2022 Qatar World Cup bidding process ignored rampant labor abuses, and in 2014, Qatar faced a forced labor complaint at the ILO. Human Rights Watch research has shown that despite subsequent reforms, the 2022 World Cup left a legacy of unaddressed abuses, including thousands of uncompensated deaths that left lasting harm for migrant workers and families.
An independent review of FIFA’s human rights responsibilities toward workers who faced harms during the delivery of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was commissioned but never published. Since Saudi Arabia’s bid, FIFA has also walked back the negotiated framework to protect labor and human rights in the delivery of the 2026 World Cup.
The human rights risks are further amplified in the Saudi context because stadium and infrastructure construction requirements are massive, the country is far larger geographically, and there are no independent human rights monitors or media.
“Without proper human rights due diligence and binding labor and human rights commitments from Saudi authorities, FIFA should not move forward with a vote to confirm Saudi Arabia as host of the 2034 World Cup,” Worden said.
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