FIFA Plans to Investigate The Arrest of BBC Crew

FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, said Monday that it was investigating after a BBC crew was detained and spent two nights in prison in Qatar while reporting on the conditions of migrant workers hired to build infrastructure and stadiums for the 2022 World Cup.

Mark Lobel, a BBC journalist based in Dubai, wrote on the BBC website that he and three colleagues were detained after they went to film a group of Nepalese workers this month. He said the crew had been invited by the Qatari government for an official tour of new housing for migrant workers.

The Qatari government was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying that Lobel and his crew were arrested because they had been trespassing on private property. A spokesman at the Qatari Embassy in London declined to elaborate.

In recent weeks, other journalists investigating the circumstances of migrant workers in Qatar have also been arrested, even as the country has been engaged in a public relations offensive aimed at mollifying critics who have criticized the labor conditions of migrant workers. In March, a German television crew was also detained while reporting in a neighborhood housing migrants.

Rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, have criticized the lack of workers' rights in the Persian Gulf, in particular among low-paid construction workers, a majority of whom come from Asia.

But the global media interest spawned by the World Cup has shone a large and uncomfortable spotlight on Qatar, a tiny, oil-rich nation.

Lobel wrote on the BBC's website that he and his crew - a cameraman, a translator and a driver - were in Doha on their way to film migrant workers when they were surrounded by eight white cars before being frisked by a dozen security officers. Then, he said, they were taken to the city's main police station and interrogated by intelligence officers. He said they were not charged but had their belongings and equipment confiscated.

During questioning, he said, he discovered that he had been followed and photographed.

"I was shown pictures of myself and the team standing in the street, at a coffee shop, on board a bus and even lying next to a swimming pool with friends. It was a shock. I had never suspected I was being tailed," Lobel wrote. "Whatever the explanation, Qatar's Jekyll-and-Hyde approach to journalism has been exposed by the spotlight that has been thrown on it after winning the World Cup bid."

FIFA said in a statement that it was investigating what had happened.

"Any instance relating to an apparent restriction of press freedom is of concern to FIFA and will be looked into with the seriousness it deserves," it said.

It added that the media had to respect the general rules of host countries, including getting the necessary permission to film.

The Qatari government was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying that Lobel and his crew had broken Qatari laws and that Lobel had sought to make "himself the story."

The BBC said in a statement that the crew should never had been arrested.

"We are pleased that the BBC team has been released but we deplore the fact that they were detained in the first place," it said. "Their presence in Qatar was no secret and they were engaged in a perfectly proper piece of journalism."

A 2013 investigation by The Guardian newspaper into kafala, a system by which workers in Qatar have been prevented from leaving their jobs or the country without permission, found that nonpayment of wages and confiscation of passports were prevalent.

The investigation concluded that workers were living in poor conditions.

The Qatari government has indicated that it wants to end the kafala system to prevent abuses and has introduced a system of oversight to ensure that workers' salaries are paid. It has also significantly ramped up the number of labor inspectors.

Nicholas McGeehan, Gulf researcher at Human Rights Watch, wrote on Twitter that the arrest of the BBC crew was "jaw-droppingly awful PR."

© 2015 New York Times News Service