Ejercicio Option A - 2 · Inglés PAU Castilla y León Extraordinaria 2023

OPTION A

WE MAY NEVER KNOW HOW MANY MIGRANTS DIED ERECTING THE QATAR WORLD CUP

The death of migrant workers erecting infrastructure for Qatar’s World Cup over the past decade

once again made headlines earlier this week. In an interview, Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary general of

Qatar’s World Cup organizing committee, told British TV presenter Piers Morgan that “around 400,

between 400 and 500” migrants died. “I don’t have the exact number. That’s something that’s been

5 discussed,” he said. The estimate is drastically higher than any other that had been offered by Qatari

officials.

Yet the World Cup committee that al-Thawadi leads swiftly retracted that comment, echoing prior

Qatari statements that 37 non-work related migrant deaths and three work-related ones took place from

2014 to 2020. Rights groups have criticized both estimates, which devalue the human tragedy of the

10 tournament.

“Companies are going out of their way to make sure that independent labor inspectors do not find

these workers, so they try to hide the treatment of them,” says Mustafa Qadri, founder and executive

director of Equidem, a labor rights consultancy reporting on the ground in Qatar. “So if that’s how

workers are treated in terms of forced labor, it raises questions around the death [toll] as well.”

15 Did 6,500 migrant workers die erecting the World Cup? In 2021, The Guardian reported that at

least 6,500 migrant workers died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup a decade ago.

However, in an Oct. 15 Twitter thread, Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor at Hamid Bin Khalifa

University in Doha, called the headline of the piece misleading and said it was the “MOST

RETWEETED article about the Qatar world cup in English,” sharing a summary of tweets in one post.

20 “The 6,500 figure actually refers to all deaths of migrant workers from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India,

and Bangladesh, regardless of cause,” he said.

Max Tuñón, head of the U.N.’s International Labour Organization (ILO) office in Doha, which

carried out a 2021 analysis of data on occupational deaths and injuries in Qatar, says determining the

number of deaths is complicated for a number of reasons. (Fragment adapted from Time.)

2) ARE THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS TRUE OR FALSE? INDICATE THE LINES THAT SUPPORT YOUR ANSWER (1 POINT).

1.

The estimate of migrant deaths, according to Hassan al-Thawadi, is slightly higher than any other provided by Qatari officials.

2.

The Guardian said that less than 6,500 migrant workers died in Qatar over the past decade.