We sat down with Geoffrey Owino, Equidem's Kenya investigator. In 2018, Geoffrey migrated to Qatar having found a job as a safety officer. During this time, he experienced poor working conditions and faced numerous labour rights violations. While there, Geoffrey found his calling, teaching others about their rights, and advocating on behalf of other migrant workers, advocacy that resulted in him being arrested multiple times, and deported back to Kenya. Back home, Geoffrey continues to fight for migrant workers’ rights, with the unique perspective of having been in their shoes. To hear more about Geoffrey’s reflections on his past experiences, and the work he’s doing now, listen to this episode.

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In this episode, we are sharing the stories of 3 former FIFA 2022 World Cup security guards who were wrongfully terminated following the tournament, then arrested and deported for peacefully standing up for their rights.

FIFA made $7.5 billion from the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, at the expense of the hundreds of migrant workers who made the tournament possible. One example of this can be seen in our investigation of Stark Security Services. After speaking with nearly 80 former employees, we learned that hundreds of migrant workers hired for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 by Stark Security Services were terminated without notice and fulfilment of their contracts, and then detained and deported back to their home countries.

After a month of holding out in the accommodation, refusing to leave, about 250 workers organised themselves to take buses to the Stark Security main office at Laffan Tower in Doha, planning to negotiate the collection of the remainder of their salary. Before arriving, they were stopped by Stark Security management in the middle of the road. The police were called, they were all detained and in the subsequent days deported back to their country of origin.

Three of the organisers – Shakir Ullah and Zafar Iqbal, both Pakistani nationals, and Mohammad Tanveer, an Indian national were arrested, and sentenced to 6 months prison and fined 10,000 Qatari Riyal (US $2,747), for having organised the group to attend Stark Security’s headquarters. At the time of the recording of this episode they remained in detention but have since been released.

Special thank you to Abid Ali, Umar Farooq and Muhammad Tayyeb for their bravery in telling their stories as well as Abdul Ahad, Ahmed Latif, and Abdur Rehman for providing their English voice overs.

To learn more about Equidem you can visit Equidem.org. If you have any questions or feedback, you can reach us at [email protected].

If you'd like to keep up to date with our next episodes you can follow us on social media, and make sure you subscribe to this podcast too. We hope you enjoyed listening!

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Welcome to Global Majority Voices, a podcast by Equidem, a global human rights organization, that’s rights holder-centred and representative of the Global Majority. This episode is an introduction to the podcast Global Majority Voices as well as who Equidem is. You'll be hearing from some of our staff who come from all over the world. To learn more about Equidem you can visit Equidem.org. If you have any questions or feedback, you can reach us at [email protected]

If you'd like to keep up to date with our next episodes you can follow us on social media, and make sure you subscribe to this podcast too. We hope you enjoyed listening!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.