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The director of FIFA wanted to definitively settle the rain of criticism that has fallen on the World Cup in Qatar one day before the ball begins to roll. Infantino addressed the complaints of human rights violations against migrant workers and the LGBTIQ+ population, recalling that Europe cannot “give moral lessons”.
Gianni Infantino spoke for three quarters of an hour before allowing the first question from the press. One day before the controversial and anticipated World Cup in Qatar kicked off, the FIFA president summoned journalists in Doha, the country’s capital, to launch a speech designed to shield himself from any criticism.
“Today I have very intense feelings. Today I feel Qatari, today I feel Arab, today I feel African, today I feel gay, today I feel disabled, today I feel like an immigrant worker.” This is how Infantino began a speech that has more headlines than those that fit in a news story.
The main argument of the FIFA director in response to criticism of the violation of human rights in Qatar was that Europe has nothing to criticize. “Europe should apologize for the last 300 years before giving moral lessons,” he said. “This one-sided moral lesson is just hypocrisy.”
The soccer World Cup has received multiple complaints about the deaths of migrant workers hired to build the pharaonic infrastructures of the sporting event. It has also been in the eye of the hurricane for organizing in a country where homosexual relationships are punishable by up to seven years in prison.
Regarding the rights of migrant workers, Infantino showed himself as a son of migrants and spoke of his own experience with prejudice. The son of Italians in Switzerland, he recalled the ridicule of his classmates for being red-haired and a foreigner. “I am the son of immigrant workers. My parents worked very hard in very difficult conditions,” he lamented.
“I remember, as a child, how they treated immigrant workers when they wanted to enter the country. (…) And when I came to Doha the first time after being elected FIFA president, I went to see where these workers lived and I told him to the people of Qatar: ‘This is not right, we have to do something’.”
According to Infantino, the Arab country has improved working conditions thanks to the World Cup. She mentioned the new service office of the International Labor Organization in the country and the fund for unpaid workers from FIFA. “Just as Switzerland has become a place of tolerance and inclusion, with rights, Qatar has made progress too,” she stressed.
Several human rights organizations have criticized that Qatar’s commitments to the human rights of workers have not been met. An investigation by Britain’s Guardian newspaper found that around 6,500 migrant workers had died since 2010, when the country was given the job of hosting the World Cup 12 years later.
Laws against the LGBTIQ+ population “exist in many countries”
Infantino delved less into the discrimination of the LGBTIQ+ population. He simply settled the criticism by recalling that, a few years or decades ago, there were many countries in Europe that criminalized homosexuality. “Those laws exist in many countries. They existed in Switzerland when it organized the World Cup in 1954,” she reasoned.
“If I asked my father this, he would probably have a different answer,” the FIFA president acknowledged, downplaying the imprisonment of LGBTIQ+ people to a small disparity of opinion.
The end of the press conference ended with another closing band to criticism of the World Cup but this time from Bryan Swanson, FIFA’s director of communication, who took the opportunity to defend the organization’s position as a gay man. .
“If you’re an LGBT person in Qatar, this cannot be public knowledge, period. There is no one person that is Qatari, that’s living in Qatar, that can go to the media right now and say, ‘I am an LGBT person.’” @Dr_NassMohamed speaking in our Space ⬇️ https://t.co/V5ad9Nbj1f
—Human Rights Watch (@hrw) October 26, 2022
“I am sitting here in a privileged position on a global stage as a gay man in Qatar,” Swanson said. “We have received assurances that everyone is welcome (…) Just because Infantino isn’t gay doesn’t mean he doesn’t care.”
Human Rights Watch collected the testimony of six people in Qatar who were detained between 2019 and 2022 and who were subjected to verbal and physical harassment by the police. They were four transgender women, a bisexual woman and a gay man.
Who is Gianni Infantino?
Despite having made one of his most political speeches to date, Infantino’s position on the World Cup has always been to ask people to enjoy football and not inquire into other issues. “At the World Cup it is necessary to focus only on soccer. Do not allow soccer to be dragged into all the ideological or political battles that exist,” he warned a few weeks ago in a letter to the teams that will participate in the competition.
Infantino, born in Switzerland in 1970 but also an Italian national, is a lawyer who made a career at UEFA, the Union of European Football Federations. He rose to the FIFA presidency in 2016 with a mission to revamp an organization marred by allegations of corruption by his predecessor, Sepp Blatter, who was embroiled in investigations into suspected bribery to host World Cups.
It is estimated that the World Cup will bring FIFA 5.745 million dollars in benefits, while Infantini earn an annual base salary of 1.53 million dollars. The basic salary of a migrant construction worker in Qatar is $275 per month, which means that she would have to work more than 460 years to reach what Infantini earns in twelve months.
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