Saudi Arabia 2034: Another FIFA World Cup of migrant worker abuse, repressed human rights and ‘sham’ processes

The docket of alleged abuses, from “rampant wage theft” to near-forced labor, read just like a chapter of recent World Cup history. On a Zoom call last week, Michael Page outlined the findings of a Human Rights Watch report that, based on 155 interviews and two years of research, detailed “dangerous” conditions for migrant workers. He explained how the notorious kafala system binds those migrants to employers. He said that many are “compelled” to pay “near universal, exorbitant, illegal recruitment fees.” He touched on “pervasive enforcement gaps” in labor laws, “minimal protections for heat,” “insufficient” investigations of worker deaths, and the lack of a minimum wage.

But he was not talking about Qatar, whose World Cup was plagued and stained by similar ills.

He was talking about migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, which on Wednesday was confirmed as host of the 2034 World Cup.

At an extraordinary virtual congress, FIFA approved by acclamation a Saudi bid decried by human rights organizations, via processes that rights advocates call “an elaborate fix” and “a sham from start to finish.” Behind closed doors last fall, FIFA officials hashed out a logic-defying deal to spread the 2030 World Cup across six countries and three continents; they then fast-tracked the race for 2034, for which Saudi Arabia was, suddenly, the only eligible and realistic bidder.

Then, for 14 months, FIFA staged its once-democratic host selection process — even though FIFA president Gianni Infantino had already celebrated Saudi Arabia's selection. Saudi officials submitted extensive plans, including for the construction of 11 new stadiums. Among the documents they submitted were a “Human Rights Strategy” and an “independent context assessment” — which Amnesty International described as a “whitewash.” They include no mention of LGBTQ+ rights, which essentially don’t exist in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is illegal. They include no critical discussion of the country’s “dire human rights record,” as a coalition of 11 organizations, including Amnesty and ALQST, a Saudi human rights defender, wrote in October.

That record, the organizations wrote, “has deteriorated under the de facto rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has presided over a soaring number of mass executions, torture, enforced disappearance, severe restrictions on free expression, repression of women’s rights under the male guardianship system, LGBTQ+ discrimination, and the killing of hundreds of migrants at the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border.”

Dozens of delegates critiqued it at the United Nations Human Rights Council earlier this year. On the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties, among 210 countries and territories, Saudi Arabia ranked 192nd, with a score of 8/100; its citizens are categorized as “Not Free.”

And then there is the pressing issue of migrant labor. Some of the 13 million-plus migrants currently in Saudi Arabia are already hard at work building infrastructure that will serve and enable the World Cup. More will arrive between now and 2034.

Compared to Qatar, which systematically abused some of its roughly 2 million migrant workers, “the scope and scale of risk, just based on the facts, is much, much bigger” in Saudi Arabia, said Page, the deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

Saudi Arabia’s confirmation as 2034 host came two weeks after FIFA finally published an internal report detailing its “responsibility” to remedy the abuses, suffering and death linked to Qatar 2022. The report, produced by a third-party advisory firm and endorsed by FIFA's Subcommittee on Human Rights and Social Responsibility, recommended that the global governing body compensate the “workers who have contributed to the resounding success of the World Cup ... who have not yet benefited from any, or any adequate remediation.”

But FIFA, two years after that World Cup, chose not to heed the recommendation; none of its Qatar World Cup Legacy Fund will be used to compensate workers of their families. (In a statement, a FIFA spokesperson wrote, in part: “It should be noted that the study did not specifically constitute a legal assessment of the obligation to remedy.”)

Instead, FIFA has invited another decade of scrutiny and, for workers in Saudi Arabia, danger.

“FIFA moving forward with a World Cup that has predictable and preventable labor rights abuses without compensating the families of thousands of migrant workers who died [while] delivering its last World Cup is really an egregious failure,” Human Rights Watch director Minky Worden said, “even by FIFA standards.”

On the subject of what, if anything, FIFA learned from its World Cup experience in Qatar, Page said: “I think what FIFA learned was how to engineer and manipulate the bidding process. What they've clearly done is shut out human rights groups for a World Cup host that potentially has the ability to have an even larger set of violations against migrant workers — but also against many others.”

FIFA praises Saudi bid despite after 'shutting out' rights experts

Representatives from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, ALQST, the Building and Wood Workers International union (BWI), and the Sport & Rights Alliance all said last week that they and others had not been consulted by FIFA, the Saudi bid nor by Clifford Chance, the law firm whose Saudi branch conducted the “independent assessment.”

That assessment was based on “desk research” and “engagement with” Saudi government ministries, but apparently not with international experts — who, as human rights advocates, have no access to Saudi Arabia.

“The Saudi authorities' narrative will always be a positive one about what is happening, because we're not a democracy,” said Lina al-Hathloul, a Saudi activist who now lives abroad, and whose sister, Loujain, was jailed and tortured for leading women’s rights campaigns. No credible assessment could be performed from within the Kingdom, Lina and others explained, because the State Security apparatus arrests and suppresses “anyone critical of anything.”

FIFA, though, largely accepted the Saudi narrative, which frames the World Cup as an accelerator of social progress, rather than a “sportswasher” of evil or an instigator of harm.

In a mostly glowing bid evaluation report released late on the night of Friday, Nov. 29, FIFA wrote that such progress “could involve significant effort and time”; but it praised the Saudi bid’s “concrete commitments” to upholding various rights, and concluded: “there are also significant opportunities for the bid to contribute to wider positive human rights impacts in Saudi Arabia under the umbrella of the country’s Vision 2030.”

Saudi labor reforms fall far short

Since the 2016 launch of that “Vision,” which aims to modernize Saudi society and diversify an oil-fueled economy, the government has introduced landmark laws to enhance worker protections and women’s rights. The problem, international rights groups say, is implementation and enforcement.

Like in Qatar — where legislation abolished the kafala system but inadequate enforcement left it somewhat intact — there have been “waves of reforms” in Saudi Arabia, Page said. But even the most notable one, the Labor Reform Initiative of 2021, “which was meant to dramatically increase migrant workers' job mobility, hasn't done so,” Page said.

In June, the BWI, which represents 12 million construction and forestry workers worldwide, filed formal complaints with the International Labor Organisation (ILO) against Saudi Arabia “for severe human rights abuses and wage theft,” and cited “exploitative living and working conditions among the country’s vast migrant workforce: conditions that BWI notes are akin to forced labor.”

Speaking to reporters last week, BWI general secretary Ambet Yuson mentioned evidence of “debt bondage,” “passport confiscation,” and “unsafe working and living conditions.”

The kafala system, Page said, “is unfortunately very much still alive and well in Saudi Arabia.” And, referencing Human Rights Watch interviews with migrants, he said that workers in remote locales assigned to “giga-projects” — such as Neom, the futuristic, $1.5 trillion development (and proposed World Cup host city) being built from scratch in the Saudi northwest — are particularly vulnerable, because they have very little access to embassies, consulates and migrant support groups.

“There is a near certainty that a FIFA World Cup hosted in Saudi Arabia will be stained with abuses,” Page said, “unless there's immediate, wholesale labor reforms that are effectively implemented.”

FIFA’s Saudi decision exposes lack of transparency, accountability

Outside the rights organizations, though, and aside from a letter sent by two U.S. senators, there has been relatively little outcry. Other than Norway’s NFF, prominent national soccer federations, including U.S. Soccer, have remained silent or even supported the Saudi bid, in part because Wednesday’s “vote by acclamation," as Infantino called it — he asked FIFA members, who were gathered via Zoom and muted, to approve the bid by visibly applauding — was always a foregone conclusion.

FIFA statutes, which were amended after the controversial selection of Qatar, now require “a fair and transparent bidding procedure” for World Cups, then a public vote by all 211 FIFA member associations. Last year, however, to evade the “fully transparent bidding process” he once championed, Infantino led an opaque, exclusive “consultation” process and brokered a clever compromise. He and a small group of top soccer officials effectively chose Saudi Arabia before any bidding process opened, and left the rest of the football world powerless.

Infantino’s autocracy, and FIFA’s opacity, could therefore be the other scandal of the 2034 World Cup. "The lack of predictability and open processes challenges trust in FIFA as the global custodian of football,” Norwegian soccer president Lise Klaveness said in a statement Tuesday. The governing body, in the words of FairSquare’s Nick McGeehan, who recently authored a 174-page report lambasting FIFA’s governance, has become “irredeemably dysfunctional.” Infantino has not held a single press conference in over a year, and has not substantively explained the secretive 2030/2034 decision.

Critics, meanwhile, have questioned his cozy relationship with Saudi authorities, including bin Salman; and the role Saudi Arabia’s money, plus its willingness to push Infantino’s revolutionary ideas, might have played in the whole plot.

They have also noted that, with Saudi Arabia as the sole 2034 bidder, FIFA “undermined its leverage” surrounding human rights. Of the various “commitments” within the Saudi 2034 human rights strategy, it is unclear what, if anything, will become contractual guarantees over the next decade. (FIFA did not directly respond to questions seeking clarity on that and its human rights due diligence. A spokesman wrote that “all relevant information” is included in bid materials on FIFA’s website.)

“It's been an empty process that's really been there to serve a predetermined outcome,” Steve Cockburn, the head of labor rights and sport at Amnesty, said last week. “And FIFA will share a responsibility [for] the real human consequences in that.”