The International Labour Organization (ILO) has dealt a blow to Qatari assertions that the Gulf state complies with global standards for workers, in a report that condemned the government for allowing state-owned Qatar Airways, in the words of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), to violate international and national agreements and institutionalise discrimination”.

The report comes at a time that Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup is under increased scrutiny, as a result of the corruption scandal that has rocked world football body FIFA, and mounting criticism of Qatar’s failure to make good on promises to improve the working and living standards of migrant workers who constitute a majority of the population. Investigations in the United States and Switzerland are probing the integrity of the Qatari bid.

In the latest World Cup-related allegations, a Monaco bank account opened by disgraced former Brazilian Football Association president and FIFA vice-president Ricardo Teixeira two years after the FIFA vote in favour of Qatar showed millions of dollars in payments by a Qatari construction company, believed to have sponsored a Brazil-Argentina friendly in Doha in advance of the awarding of the World Cup.

… James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog,The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the same title.