1400 Dead Going On 4000: The Blood Soaked FIFA 2022 Qatar World Cup Built with Slave Labor

I'm brought up with football – that is what North Americans call "soccer" – and I continue to enjoy watching games occasionally. In particular – as most fans of the sport – I immensely enjoy the World Cup play offs, taking place every forth year and assembling the very best players in a context packed with emotion and challenge. In sports, this event has almost the status and grandiosity of the Olympics – and, alas, is headed by an almost as obviously corrupt organisation, FIFA (read this and this) whose executive committee members and higher officers I'm sure all enjoy all sorts of pleasures as they choose which country is to arrange the next round. For the 2022 WC, FIFA, in all its wisdom and care for their executive committee members' bank accounts, choose one of the worlds most supremely wealthy countries – sure to be able to part with a few handsome installments – Qatar.

What FIFA has been caring rather less about, however, is how Qatar has gone about preparing for the games. True to its reputation of going for architectorial grandiosity, the Qatar organisers have ventured on constructing five spectacular new stadiums, dreams of material affluence to be seen here. Or, rather, these stadiums are being constructed by a huge herd of imported laborers, who have been repeatedly reported to persist and work under slave-like conditions (here, here, here, here), no matter how much Qatar officials have attempted to play innocent. This video documentary sums up some of the horrifying sides of this appalling affair:



Did I say "persist"? I'm so sorry! In April this year, under the heading of "Stop the carnage!", it was revealed by the Building and Wood Worker's International that at least 1380 immigrant construction workers have died since the preparations started in 2010, and "at the current rate, more than 4,000 migrant workers will die by the time Qatar puts on the 2022 World Cup", reports New Republic. Indeed, 4000! For a little bit of sports entertainment ...

FIFA, on its side of the fence has felt some of the pressure and made "demands" on Qatar to improve things, however, also making clear through its head Sepp Blatter – at the end of the video above – that the decision to award the game to Qatar is "irreversible". The latest effort on this matter is an impressive bowl of nothing, where FIFA on its webpages declares "We look forward to seeing the implementation of these concrete actions over the next months", with reference to announced coming labor law reforms in Qatar. Very handsome and sporty, as when the shit started to hit the fan in earnest in late November 2013, the demand was that "fair working conditions with a lasting effect must be introduced quickly". I'm sure the Qatar organisers as well as the FIFA executives all feel extrememly content with themselves as they glance at their latest balance sheets.

Anybody in for a little boycott? It's all very easy – just turn off or redirect your telly/computer/pad/phone in a few weeks in 2022, and the calculated add revenues will disappear into thin air. Even some pretty great players talk openly about it, so why not us regular audience people? Here's one Facebook page trying to assemble support for this cause and here's another.

Why I'm Sceptical to the Idea of Harvesting Donor Organs from Living People

In a recent article in the Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics (alas behind a paywall for those of you who lack access to university library services or have a private subscription), it is argued that the so-called Death Donor Rule (DDR) of most (if not all) regulations of organ donation around the world, is not valid from a moral point of view. It is the Canadian bioethicist Walter Glannon, who argues that the requirement with regard to so-called vital organs – that is organs, the removal of which is not compatible with sustained life of the donor – that they should not be removed until the donor is dead in fact lacks support of relevant ethical arguments. The thesis and argument have been picked up by the shadily cloaked Christian/Catholic "bioethics news" webpage, BioEdge, where there is some cautious snickering and mockery, albeit as usual without any hint of argument (which is the usual BE style), and from there passed around on Twitter. 

Now, what Glannon points out is that death, in the present day of organ donation regulations, has become a purely man-made institution: Death is whatever is defined as death in relevant legal statutes. So, "brain death" is one such legal institution which makes vital organ donation compatible with the DDR, while "heart death" makes these two much more difficult or even impossible to combine. But these legal constructs do not become ethically relevant merely because we call them "death". To see what is ethically relevant, we have to look for what moral reasons there are for or against taking a vital organ. We may then compare the outcome of such an analysis to the DDR. This, it would seem, is what Glannon does, and he points to four interconnected reasons when it comes to the case of severely and irreparably brain-damaged patients:

1. That the removal of the vital organ does not harm the donor

2. That an earlier death does not deprive the donor of any meaningful or valuable life

3. That the removal of the organ and its subsequent use for transplantation is in line with the donor's known wants, as expressed by him-/herself or a validly appointed proxy

4. That the donation actually leads to a successful transplantation

What matters is not that the donor is or is not dead, or when death is declared, but that the donor or a surrogate consents, that the donor has an irreversible condition with no hope of meaningful recovery, that procurement does not cause the donor to experience pain and suffering, and that the donor’s intention is realized in a successful transplant.

From this Glannon also concludes that doctors or relatives who try to forestall or delay a donation of a vital organ can be argued to wrong the donor. This is called "paradoxical" by the BioEdge commentator without a hint of any argument. However, the conclusion would seem to follow swiftly from premises 1 and 3 – as long as conditions 2 and 4 are assumed to be met. Not acting on the donor's wants would be one way of going against those of his/her interests that are assumed to be of ethical relevance also by supporters of the DDR.

Glannon's conclusion is that:

We should reject the view that organ donors are beyond harm only after they have been declared dead and that they are harmed if organ procurement occurs before this time

Thus falls the ethical basis of the DDR, or so it may seem. However, while I accept Glannon's argument, I do not accept that it is a valid reason to remove the DDR. That is, while Glannon does support the idea that death (however it happens to be defined in a legal statute) is not by itself ethically relevant when looking at single cases (what is relevant is the presence or non-presence of harm, deprivation of goods or disrespect of wants), it does not follow from that claim that the DDR should be taken out of organ donation regulation.

The problem with Glannon's argument is that it assumes that the only reason for a legal rule is that it immediately reflects morally relevant facts in single cases, or that it gets it right from an ethical point of view in single cases. However, that is clearly not the only support for legal rules that there are. I, on my part, would argue that the strongest support of legal rules is about the overall impact of the legal system containing them. So, it is actually not important if legal statutes echo ethically valid norms or if they get it ethically right in every single case (or even most cases). The importance is about the legal system as whole getting it reasonably right on the level of the entire society, and that this system has enough popular support for this body of regulation to be sustainable. This may imply that some legal rules do echo ethical norms, or track them in application, however, that is a side-effect rather than a justification. What justifies the rule is that the system functions well on the whole on the basis of some plausible set of values.

Now, in light of this, we can see what is the problem with the idea of removing the DDR. The problem is, simply put, the strong reasons for not tampering with the legal rule against murder, manslaughter and other forms of unjustified homicide. For this is what we would have to do if we are to take away the DDR – we would have to say that intentionally cutting up a living person so that he or she dies is sometimes not a crime. The problem, of course, starts when we think about how to formulate and implement this sort of clause in a way that would be both legally secure and certain, socio-economically efficient (with regard to the problem of organ donation as well as the general interest of society not to have people going about killing each other for whatever reason, and the resources that would have to be spent of running the administration of the clause) and, on the basis of that, ethically justified. Now, I'm not trying to belittle the problem of the shortage of donor organs, that is indeed a problem. But is it a problem of a gravity that motivates starting to play around with the core statute in criminal law? I don't think so.