Reports warn of thousands of construction fatalities in Saudi Arabia ...Middle East

Each called on FIFA and the Saudi government to adequately protect their safety and rights.

In its report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said scores of migrant workers die in gruesome yet avoidable work accidents, including falling from buildings, electrocution and, in one case, decapitation.

HRW interviewed families of 31 deceased migrant workers from Bangladesh, India, and Nepal who died between the ages of 23 and 52 in Saudi Arabia.

It also interviewed two social workers based in origin countries who helped families repatriate the remains of their dead husbands, sons and brothers, and three current migrant workers who witnessed colleagues’ deaths.

HRW said Saudi authorities do not adequately protect workers from preventable deaths, investigate workplace safety incidents, or ensure timely and adequate compensation for families.

It claimed that most migrant worker deaths in Saudi Arabia are erroneously classified as “natural” and neither investigated nor compensated.

HRW found that classification applied to 74% of 1,420 Indian worker deaths recorded just at the Indian embassy in Riyadh in 2023.

It also applied to 80% of 887 Bangladeshi deaths during the first six months of 2024, and 68% of 870 Nepali migrant worker deaths from 2019 to 2022.

‘Huge red flag for businesses and fans’

In its response to HRW, FIFA wrote that it plans to establish a workers’ welfare system with mandatory standards and enforcement mechanisms for World Cup-related construction in Saudi Arabia, but gave no details on concrete measures to prevent, investigate, and compensate deaths.

“The gruesome workplace accidents killing migrant workers in Saudi Arabia should be a huge red flag for businesses, football fans, and sports associations seeking to partner with FIFA on the 2034 Men’s World Cup and other Saudi ‘giga-projects’,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

“Given that Saudi authorities are failing to adequately ensure basic safety protections and social security for migrant workers, local and international companies face a larger responsibility to ensure that serious rights violations are not occurring throughout their business operations in Saudi Arabia.”

‘Critical absence of effective policies’

A separate investigation by rights group Fairsquare highlights what it called a “critical absence of effective policies and processes” to determine the cause of migrant worker deaths.

Its investigation was based on medical and government documentation relating to the deaths of 17 Nepali men in Saudi Arabia in 2023 and 2024.

It said the country’s migrant worker workforce grew by 40% to 13.2 million in the five years up to 2024, as the kingdom launched transformational giga projects.

And hundreds of thousands more will be needed to build the stadiums and infrastructure for the 2034 FIFA men’s World Cup, which will involve at least eight new stadiums, 73 new training and accommodation facilities, a series of major transport infrastructure projects, and a 500% increase in hotel capacity.

‘Pitched into a system that risks their lives’

“Hundreds of thousands of young men, many of whom have young families, are being pitched into a labour system that poses a serious risk to their lives, a medical system that doesn’t have the capacity to determine the cause of their deaths, and a political system that doesn’t appear to either protect them or find out how they died, let alone compensate the families shattered by Saudi Arabia’s negligence,” said FairSquare co-director James Lynch.

“While FIFA praises Saudi Arabia to the rafters and highly-paid western law firms generate vast profits for curating Saudi’s reputation, children in places like Nepal grow up without their fathers and never even learn how they died.”

Further Reading:

Reports warn of thousands of construction fatalities in Saudi Arabia Global Construction Review.

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