»Wanderarbeiter in Qatar werden ausgebeutet und misshandelt«

The abuses against migrant workers in the construction sector in Qatar are grim. Amnesty International's research reveals widespread exploitation of migrant workers at the hands of their employers. The abuse, which takes place against a backdrop of discriminatory attitudes against many categories of migrant workers, includes:

- workers arriving in Qatar to find that the terms and conditions of their work are different to those they had been promised during the recruitment process – including salaries being lower than promised;

- workers having their pay withheld for months, or not being paid at all;

- employers leaving workers "undocumented" and therefore at risk of being detained by the authorities;

- migrant workers having their passports confiscated and being prevented from leaving the country by their employers;

- workers being made to work excessive (sometimes extreme) hours and employers failing to protect workers’ health and safety adequately; and

- workers being housed in squalid accommodation.

The impact of such practices on individuals can easily be underestimated. Each of these practices, on its own, is unacceptable. But many workers face the cumulative effect of being subjected to several components of such abuse simultaneously, an experience which can be difficult to capture.

During interviews, researchers have encountered many workers in severe psychological distress due to the treatment they had received and their sense of powerlessness to resolve their own situations. Many spoke movingly of the trauma they felt at not being able to send money back to their home countries for months at a time, at the thought of their families being harassed by moneylenders and having to sell possessions to pay the rent on their homes.

Some of the situations that Amnesty International found were deep crises, with large groups of migrant workers – undocumented through no fault of their own – facing a range of serious problems simultaneously: not being paid for six or nine months; not being able to get out of the country; not having enough – or any – food; and being housed in very poor accommodation with poor sanitation, or no electricity.

Researchers carried out interviews in candlelight and met workers who had been sleeping on the roof of their accommodation because their rooms had no air conditioning, despite the very high summer temperatures.

ILO Convention 29 on Forced Labour, to which Qatar is a state party, defines forced labour as encompassing two key elements: work that the person has not offered themselves for voluntarily and which is extracted under threat of a penalty. The ILO has emphasized that “menace of penalty” refers not only to criminal sanctions but also to various forms of coercion, such as threats, violence, retention of identity documents, confinement or nonpayment of wages:

"The key issue is that workers should be free to leave an employment relationship without losing any rights or privileges. Examples are the threat to lose a wage that is due to the worker or the right to be protected from violence."

Amnesty International found cases where people were engaged in work for which they had not offered themselves voluntarily - because they had been deceived about their terms or conditions, or had pay withheld for months at a time. They faced credible threats of penalties if they were to stop working. The threatened penalties included withholding passports, withholding permission to leave the country and failure to provide pending salaries. These cases constitute forced labour. Where migrants had clearly been deceived into situations of forced labour, they were also victims of human trafficking.

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