Since 2010, when the country was awarded the right to host the 2022 World Cup, Qatar’s migrant worker population has rapidly expanded. Driven in part by the subsequent construction boom, the country’s population jumped from 1.6 million people in December 2010 to 2.7 million in October 2018. Coming from some of the world’s poorest countries, and working in sectors including construction, hospitality and domestic service, migrant workers make up 95% of the country’s labour force. Yet with rapidly increasing numbers of workers travelling to take advantage of economic opportunities, more also fell victim to Qatar’s exploitative labour system.

The abuse and exploitation of low paid migrant workers, sometimes amounting to forced labour and human trafficking, have been extensively documented since the World Cup was awarded to Qatar. In October 2013, for example, The Guardian reported that 44 Nepali workers had died in Qatar in just a two-month period, while Amnesty International reports in 2013 and 2016 documented large scale labour abuse in the construction sector, including forced labour, such as at Doha’s Khalifa Stadium. In 2014 the UN Special Rapporteur on Migrant Rights also described how “exploitation is frequent and migrants often work without pay and live in substandard conditions”, and called for the country’s sponsorship system to be abolished.

Despite nascent reforms, such labour abuse continues on a significant scale today. In September 2018, Amnesty International published an investigation into an engineering company called Mercury MENA that had left dozens of workers stranded and penniless, eventually feeling obliged to return home in debt despite being owed thousands of dollars of wages and benefits. The workers had been involved in building vital infrastructure serving the city and stadium hosting the opening and the final matches of the 2022 World Cup. In a separate high-profile case first reported in May 2018, a group of 1,200 workers went unpaid for several months and went weeks without running water or electricity.