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	FIFA World Cup brings focus on migrant worker rights by HRW, Amnesty, FairSquare, agencies   Global Coalition calls for financial remedy for deaths, wage theft at upcoming FIFA World Cup.   Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Qatar have not received financial compensation or any other adequate remedy for serious labor abuses suffered while building and servicing infrastructure for the FIFA World Cup, which begins in November 2022, Human Rights Watch said today.   Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, FairSquare, and a global coalition of migrant rights groups, labor unions, international football fans, abuse survivors, and business and rights groups say that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the government of Qatar should provide remedy for serious abuses that migrant workers have suffered since the 2022 World Cup was awarded in 2010. These include thousands of unexplained deaths and injuries, wage theft, and exorbitant recruitment fees.   Human Rights Watch has opened a global campaign, #PayUpFIFA, to support this coalition call. Amnesty International is releasing a report, “Predictable and Preventable,” setting out how FIFA and Qatar can remedy 12 years of abuses.   “FIFA and Qatar have failed migrant workers, who have been essential for the 2022 World Cup, but they can still provide compensation to those seriously harmed and the families of the many who died,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch. “FIFA should immediately set aside the funds needed to provide an adequate remedy and avoid the legacy of a ‘World Cup of Shame.’”   Over the last decade, human rights groups have repeatedly documented the widespread abuses workers face under Qatar’s kafala (sponsorship) system, which can give rise to forced labor. This is despite labor reforms that Qatari authorities have introduced in recent years in response to a forced labor complaint before the International Labour Organization. As recently as March, Human Rights Watch documented wage theft for up to five months at a prominent Qatari trading and construction firm with FIFA-related projects.   When workers engaged in stadium-related projects that are held to higher global scrutiny and standards do not have adequate protections, workers outside stadium-related projects are unsurprisingly prone to greater abuses. Moreover, Qatar’s poor human rights record creates other serious concerns, including severe restrictions on free expression and peaceful assembly, state policies that discriminate and facilitate violence against women, and a repressive environment against sexual minorities (LGBT) and visitors.   When FIFA, the global football governing body, awarded the 2022 tournament to Qatar, it knew or should have known that the migrant workers building the massive infrastructure would face grave risks to their human rights. Yet FIFA neither imposed labor rights conditions nor undertook effective human rights due diligence, Human Rights Watch said.   For Manju Devi, a 38-year-old Nepali woman whose 40-year-old migrant worker husband, Kripal Mandal, died in Qatar in 2022, the only “legacy” of the upcoming World Cup is the outstanding loans her husband took out to pay for the job that he died doing. Like most migrant workers in Qatar, Mandal had borrowed money at exorbitant rates to pay recruitment fees, a debt that continues to increase. While Qatar prohibits charging migrant workers recruitment fees and related costs, the government rarely enforces this regulation.   Mandal’s family said that he worked in construction for a supply company that assigned him to the airport and stadiums. His wife is still grappling to comprehend his death from a heart attack. “I cannot say what the reason behind his death is,” Devi told Human Rights Watch. “Whether it is the cause they reported or something else, we cannot tell … In the evening he was talking properly and laughing, … but he died at around 3 a.m. the next morning.”   The family did not receive any compensation for his death, and his employer even failed to pay the 15 days of salary he was contractually owed. Devi, a mother of five, said, “When he was alive, there was an assurance that there is someone who earns. Now after he died, our breadwinner is no longer alive. It is very difficult.”   “Qatar’s worker’s rights reforms came very late in the World Cup preparation, are woefully inadequate, and are poorly enforced,” said Worden. “Large numbers of migrant workers died because Qatar lacked a human rights framework that protected workers and allowed them to report dangerous working conditions, wage cheating, and forced labor. Workers do not need to die to deliver the World Cup or any mega-sporting event.”   In 2016, FIFA adopted the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and enshrined its responsibility to respect human rights in the FIFA Statutes. It also set up an independent Human Rights Advisory Board, employed human rights staff, and set up a complaints mechanism for human rights defenders. In 2017, FIFA adopted a human rights policy stating that human rights commitments are binding on all FIFA bodies and officials.   Despite these positive developments, FIFA still needs to provide remedy to migrant workers who suffered serious abuses or their families. This includes responsibility toward workers directly employed in World Cup projects and those who have built and serviced a wider range of projects for tournament preparation and delivery, including transportation, accommodations, security, and cleaning, among others.   FIFA needs to work with Qatari authorities in the six-month leadup to the 2022 World Cup to establish a comprehensive program to address abuses suffered by migrant workers, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Fair Square, and the other coalition members said. FIFA should set aside at least $440 million, equivalent to the prize money provided to 2022 World Cup teams, to invest in funds to compensate workers and improve worker protections.   The remediation program should be governed in a participatory way following consultation with stakeholders, including migrant workers, surviving family members, and trade unions. It needs to be easily accessible to workers and their families, many of whom will no longer be in Qatar. And it needs to offer a timely remedy for a wide range of unaddressed abuses since 2010.   Players, fans, FIFA sponsors, national football associations, and others can play an important role in securing a positive legacy for this World Cup by calling for support for a compensation fund to remedy the harm to migrant workers, Human Rights Watch said.   “The deaths of migrant workers in Qatar have taken a massive emotional and financial toll on their families,” Worden said. “In line with FIFA’s human rights commitments and Qatar’s obligations, they need to provide financial compensation to the migrant workers harmed building the World Cup and some financial respite for struggling families.”   http://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/03/fifa-receives-open-letter-backed-by-a-million-signatures-demanding-justice-for-abused-world-cup-workers/ http://www.hrw.org/news/2023/03/16/fifa-approve-legacy-fund-2022-world-cup-abuses http://www.business-humanrights.org/en/blog/qatar-2022-what-is-the-legacy-for-workers-who-made-the-world-cup-happen/ http://www.hrw.org/news/2022/05/18/fifa-pay-harm-qatars-migrant-workers http://www.hrw.org/PayUpFIFA http://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/19/football/gianni-infantino-speech-reaction-qatar-2022-world-cup-spt-intl/index.html http://www.dw.com/en/germany-blasts-fifa-for-restricting-human-rights-protests-in-qatar/a-63817479   June 2022   World of work a critical arena for minority and indigenous peoples’ rights – new global report highlights.   Minority Rights Group International (MRG) releases its annual report today, with this year’s edition offering a broad scrutiny of work-related exclusion across the world.   ‘The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the many challenges that minorities and indigenous peoples face in the workplace,’ says Carl Soderbergh, MRG’s Director of Policy and Communications, and lead reviewer of the volume. ‘The world of work all too often reinforces broader societal inequalities. From life-threatening working conditions and racist barriers to promotion, to forced labour and even slavery, the diverse human rights abuses produced by today’s global economy warrant urgent attention.’   Exclusion is evidenced at every level of employment, from local informal sectors to the multinational operations of big business. Discrimination can be deeply structural, with roots in caste and slavery, but its impacts are very contemporary, such as through the precarious nature of much of the gig economy.   ‘While the discrimination and exploitation that minorities and indigenous peoples face at work have specific histories rooted in local contexts, the legacy of colonialism is felt through the ever-more interlinked nature of worldwide supply chains which globalize a range of human rights abuses’, emphasises Soderbergh.   Through analysis of ten global themes, Minorities and Indigenous Trends 2022: Focus on Work draws out findings across a wide range of areas, from the continuing impact of colonialism in today’s economy to the persistence of slavery and caste-based discrimination.   The ten themes analysed are agriculture, construction, education and training, extractives and natural resources, manufacturing and logistics, precarious work, services, slavery, tourism and traditional livelihoods.   ‘It is critical that minorities and indigenous peoples are given full access to the same labour rights, protections and support as those enjoyed by others and guaranteed by international law,’ says Söderbergh. ‘This would deliver them their fair share of the economic gains their countries enjoy and go a long way towards overturning the broader marginalisation they face.’   http://minorityrights.org/2022/06/15/trends2022/ http://minorityrights.org/programmes/library/trends/trends2022/   Feb. 2022   Migrant worker rights: providing meaningful access to remedy is paramount - Anti-Slavery International   Migrant workers are often highly vulnerable to exploitation when working in the private sector, due to issues that include the absence of safe migration routes, recruitment fees, the withholding of personal documents such as passports, and weak national legal protections for migrant workers.   When migrant workers’ rights are violated or migrants become subjected to forced labour, it’s often enormously difficult for them to access remedy for the harm caused. Access to remedy means that workers should be able to exercise their rights, report abuses and access effective remedies. Remedy does not only mean financial compensation, but can also involve apologies, restitution, rehabilitation, as well as steps to guarantee the prevention of further harm, for example.   Migrant workers are often excluded, or face severe obstacles, in trying to claim their rights through formal state-led or legal remedy routes. Other non-state routes may also be off limits. For example, migrant workers may be unable to join trade unions. Employers may also use workers’ immigration status as a threat against them, meaning migrant workers face the risk of losing their livelihoods if they raise a grievance.   Faced with such obstacles, companies must therefore make sure that migrant workers in their supply chains have meaningful access to remedy. However, current company-led approaches to access remedy, such as company telephone hotlines, more often than not fail to achieve this. This is due to the lack of oversight, independence and accountability needed to secure migrant workers’ trust and guarantee effective remedy resolutions.   Companies must support approaches where workers, or their credible representatives, are instead involved in the design, implementation and monitoring of access to remedy routes. Ultimately access to remedy approaches must be capable of addressing the power imbalance that typically exists between a migrant worker and their employer.   Companies must make sure that violations of migrant workers’ rights are addressed to meet their responsibilities under the United Nations Guiding Principles (UNGPs), particularly in consideration of ongoing efforts for the introduction of mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence in many countries.   http://www.antislavery.org/migrant-worker-rights-providing-meaningful-access-to-remedy-is-paramount/ http://www.ihrb.org/focus-areas/migrant-workers/realising-rights-and-maximising-benefits-improving-development-outcomes-through-the-responsible-recruitment-of-migrant-workers Visit the related web page
	Hunger is unacceptable in the 21st century by Gabriela Bucher Executive Director of Oxfam International, agencies   Apr. 2022   Hunger is unacceptable in the 21st century, by Gabriela Bucher - Executive Director of Oxfam International   A mother in Somalia skips another meal so her children can eat. A father in Syria works for 13 hours but still cannot afford enough food for his family. A father in Niger sees his children go to sleep hungry.   Food prices, already rising from the pandemic, have skyrocketed because of the war in Ukraine; the World Bank estimating a shocking 37 percent rise. The price of wheat soared 80 percent between April 2020 and December 2021. In Syria, food prices have doubled in the last year.   The world was already rife with hunger before COVID-19 struck. In 2020, up to 811 million people – nearly one in 10 people – did not have enough food. And now the world is hurtling towards an unprecedented hunger crisis.   Many poorer countries are unable – and are too often made unable by an unequal global food system – to produce enough food to feed their people. They must rely on food imports. The reason is simple: crops are difficult to grow. The reasons for this are less simple: man-made climate breakdown is intensifying floods and droughts, locusts are ravaging crops, conflicts are destroying farmland and infrastructure, and people simply do not have enough money to buy seeds and equipment to grow crops.   Moreover, half of crops globally are now used to produce biofuels, animal feed and other products, like textiles. Many of these crops are monoculture, growing only one type of crop which destroys biodiversity and pulls nutrients from the soil. Not only is valuable farming land being used to grow crops not for food, but also the type of farming used damages the environment and results in fewer crops in the long term.   The reliance on food imports creates extreme vulnerability to external shocks. Nearly half of African countries import more than a third of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine. Fifteen countries, including Lebanon, Egypt and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, import more than half their share. Nearly all of Somalia’s wheat, where the worst drought in over 40 years has left millions facing famine-like conditions, comes from Russia and Ukraine.   And so rising and fluctuating food prices have hit vulnerable countries like a sledgehammer. Forty-two percent of Yemen’s wheat was shipped from Ukraine in the three months from December 20, 2021 to March 6, 2022, according to a shipping source consulted by Oxfam. A week after the war in Ukraine started, wheat prices in war-torn Yemen increased by 24 percent. The United Nations has said the country’s already dire hunger crisis is “teetering on the edge of outright catastrophe”. Lesson learned: dependency is dangerous.   Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results. Advocates of large-scale, intensive industrial agriculture are saying, yet again, that we should ramp up global production. But this is not the solution. The world’s farmers produce enough food to feed the global population, and in recent years, the world has witnessed record harvests of grain production. The main problem is access to food, not availability. We need systemic change, not a short-term fix.   Governments tried to take short-cuts during the global 2007 – 2008 global food crisis which saw wheat and rice prices nearly double, pushing 100 million people into poverty, and by 2009 over one billion into hunger. The policy responses were either one-off, short-term initiatives or focused on the wrong target – increased production and investment in the private sector. These measures did nothing but plaster over the already existing cracks in the global food system, a system that is unsustainable for people and the planet.   We need to recognise that the underlying causes of hunger lie in extreme inequality. Immediately, governments must urgently bridge the gap between what people can afford and the price of the food they need. More funds are needed to deliver aid to people facing severe hunger across the world. Most importantly, donor governments should not raid aid budgets earmarked for crises in poor countries to pay for the new costs of Ukrainian support. Denmark has already cut their funding to Mali, Syria and Bangladesh. Sweden has followed suit, as has the United Kingdom. No life is more valuable than another.   Rich countries rightfully spent trillions of dollars to save their economies from the impact of the pandemic. A mere fraction of that is needed to make sure people around the world can put food on the table. But governments must go much further. That means investing in a sustainable future for all, in which small-scale family farming plays a key role.   Small-scale family farms feed one-third of the world’s population, and in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa they provide more than 70 percent of the food supply. If these farmers had more access to land, water, funding, infrastructure and markets, and their rights protected, they could produce much more food. They could drastically reduce poverty and hunger.   That means, vitally, addressing the unequal climate crisis in which the poorest people and small-scale farmers who did the least to cause the crisis suffer the most at the expense of the over-consumption of the one percent. And it means addressing extreme land inequality – including guaranteeing women smallholder farmers land rights.   These are all things governments can – and should – urgently do. Hunger is unacceptable in the 21st century. To witness millions a step away from famine in a world of plenty, in a world where billionaire wealth has exploded, is an abomination. Only the right political choices can end hunger.   http://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/terrifying-prospect-over-quarter-billion-more-people-crashing-extreme-levels-poverty http://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/one-person-likely-dying-hunger-every-48-seconds-drought-ravaged-east-africa-world http://unctad.org/news/un-crisis-response-group-calls-immediate-action-avert-cascading-impacts-war-ukraine http://www.hrw.org/news/2022/04/28/ukraine/russia-war-continues-africa-food-crisis-looms http://ipes-food.org/pages/foodpricecrisis http://www.wfp.org/hunger-catastrophe http://reliefweb.int/report/world/global-report-food-crises-2022 Visit the related web page
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