Annie Kuo Becker (AKB): Welcome to Discovery, a podcast where we interview our distinguished faculty at the University of Washington School of Law, and guests to our school who are legal experts from around the world. I'm your host, Annie Kuo Becker. Unless you've been living under a rock, Seattle is one of the host cities for this summer's FIFA 2026 World Cup. We'll be hosting six matches and 750,000 visitors from around the world. On this episode, we're speaking with Professor of Law Anita Ramasastry, who helped create the Human Rights Plan for the World Cup. She is an expert on the intersection of business and human rights, a field she helped create. She's also an advisor to the UN Human Rights Council and an independent human rights advisor to FIFA's Human Rights Subcommittee. Welcome, Anita.
Anita Ramasastry (AR): Thanks.
AKB: What is a human rights plan? Let's start there. And what does human rights have to do with a global soccer tournament?
AR: Yeah, so, well, FIFA, you know, you mentioned that I'm an expert in business and human rights, and FIFA, as a sporting body, is a large economic player. It's like a company, almost. And so, when it runs these tournaments, there's a lot of money and commerce, right, and so the question is, when FIFA comes to town, is there a way to hold a tournament safely and securely for the people in the community, for the fans, for the players, in a way where, in addition to positive things, there isn't any harm?
So, the whole idea of kind of business and human rights is this idea that when you have an economic activity like a mega sporting event, can you take steps to actually identify the risks of holding a tournament and take steps to prevent those, and if there is harm or something happens, to actually provide a remedy to people.
Let me give you a good example. So, a simple one, I think, is, you know, there's a risk of human trafficking, right? So, again, with a mega sporting event, and you mentioned the number of people coming into the city with all the visitors, right, there's an increased risk of sex trafficking and also labor trafficking, right, with all the workers. So, again, you want to sort of anticipate that and have methods in host cities, or FIFA in the stadium, to actually deal with that. There are also other issues around, you know, people coming from different countries, fans that have, you know, different views, and so forth, and you want to make sure that the match is safe and inclusive for everybody that comes.
AKB: The work that you're doing spans so many areas, from trafficking to workers' rights to LGBTQ rights, and so we're going to get into some of that. Can we go back to the 2022 Qatar World Cup? The events that transpired there, the egregious migrant workers violations led to this focused need for a human rights plan. Can you tell us a little more about what happened that made human rights a focus for part of the bidding to host the World Cup?
AR: Sure, and so, if we actually go back and rewind and think about the Qatar World Cup, a few things happened around 2016, same time, you know, again, when Qatar was being identified as a host country, FIFA also had a scandal with respect to corruption and bribery, and there was a huge reputational issue around the organization.
So, at that time, along with, I think, outside scrutiny from the UN, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, and from other experts, there was really, I think, an increased push, and also from the International Labor Organization and workers' trade unions, to say there are concerns about Qatar, because they had to construct all new stadiums, and all of those stadiums were going to be constructed by migrant workers in extreme heat. And there was also just concern about even labor conditions in terms of migrant work.
So, there was external pressure for FIFA to make certain kinds of international human rights commitments around how they hosted tournaments, which they have done, but this was kind of midstream. So, in the middle of that, there was really an attention on, “how can there be, kind of, positive improvements to make sure that migrant workers were able to work safely, that they did have good working conditions?”
So, there were, I think, positive steps, and the government was asked to step forward in partnership with FIFA during the tournament. Now, there are different questions, which we can get to in a second, about the legacy, and, you know, there were worker deaths and there are issues now, like, did everybody who was harmed actually receive, you know, remedy and reparations?
But to say that there were reforms to the labor law system, there were additional protections put in place relating to construction, the major building and woodworkers union was a partner in Qatar. So, I would just say that there are certain things. But as we fast forward, so Qatar was the first moment when FIFA was saying, "Okay, we should make human rights commitments," and when I keep saying that, that's just about identifying those human rights risks, right, from hosting the tournament. It's not solving everything in a country but just saying we don't want to do more harm, we want to just have a safe tournament.
So, when the bids for this World Cup 2026 were happening, it was the first time when countries that were bidding had to put in a human rights plan or chapter to their bids. So, U.S., Canada and Mexico did a united bid, and they actually, one of the things about this tournament is that they didn't have to build new stadiums, right? So, that was attractive, and so those three countries were competing against Morocco. So, that was, I think, important, and there is a human rights component to that.
I got involved at the next stage, which is that once the three countries won the bid, the question was, who is going to host? And so, there were questions about how each host city needed to step up and show that they were going to actually have human rights plans. So, I was fortunate to be able to work with the Seattle bid committee, and actually students at UW Law we had to go out and interview stakeholders, right, community members, different types of organizations, to say, what are the risks we think are going to be here in Seattle from hosting the tournament? And we identified issues like, you know, there might be challenges around people being able to peacefully protest. Will the police respect that right? We have, you know, unhoused people, right, who are in and around the stadium. Will they be forcibly displaced, and will there be ways to make sure that they have access to the services that they usually get in that area?
What about inclusion? You mentioned LGBTQ plus rights, right? So, are we going to make sure that there are strong protections against discrimination? And then, of course, you know, workers' rights. So, those are the kinds of things we identified, and several years ago had to identify as part of just bidding for hosting. What were those issues for the tournament?
I also, you know, again, based on my own work, have been fortunate to work as an advisor to the entire tournament. So, I have been working with FIFA 2026 as well as all of the host cities around this journey that they've all been on, right? So, Seattle's had to step forward and say we need an action plan. What are we going to do when the tournament happens? But so has Dallas, so has Kansas City, right, so has Vancouver, right? So, it's been this journey for many, many cities.
AKB: I imagine that LA is creating a human rights action plan for the city also helps with their hosting the Olympics in a couple years.
AR: Yeah, and absolutely. And there's a question about whether the next women's World Cup will come to the U.S., right? So, FIFA is one organization that has made these steps and commitments to human rights as part of hosting these tournaments, but so has the International Olympic Committee. So, very much so that LA is using this as a place to embed good practices that we hope we'll see in the Olympics as well.
AKB: Did the Olympics have a human rights plan, or is the FIFA World Cup, kind of, the one who's taking the lead on this focus?
AR: No, so it's really all, so what we've seen is this trend, and part of it is, again, the work I do relates to a UN framework, and I'm not going to get into the weeds. It's something called the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, but that framework basically asks companies or big organizations that have large, kind of, market power to think about the human rights impacts of their global activities, right?
You know, FIFA procures lots of T-shirts and things from, you know, in their global supply chains, making sure that there's no forced labor or child labor in that. That's just a clear example, but it's not the only body. Another person who I've been really fortunate to work with as a partner in this is someone who is an Olympian who lives in Washington state. Her name is Mary Harvey, and she is the director of the Center for Sport and Human Rights.
And so, her center, which is really focused on all kinds of issues, really has been focused on human rights implementation with the Olympics, with UEFA, which is the European soccer league, around these same things. And so, Mary actually worked on, we talked about earlier, like when the U.S., Canada and Mexico got the bid, Mary was involved in that, and that's how she and I got to meet and work with one another.
AKB: And I just want to put a plug in here. We'll link to this in the show notes, but Professor Ramasastry, Mary, and one of our alums, Maya Mendoza Edstrom, was on a panel, a series of panels hosted by the Global Sports Lab and the Jackson School of International Studies. We'll link to that in the show notes, but it's all focused on the Seattle World Cup.
AR: And actually, one more alum, so Leo Flor, who is now the Chief Legacy Officer for Seattle 2026, is another UW Law alum. So, it was a great panel, because, again, it was really great to see these experts, you know, who love soccer, but who are also really thinking about what's the positive contribution that the World Cup will bring to Seattle, not to FIFA, but to Seattle.
AKB: Yeah, and there's, like, two particular panels, one focused on the World Cup in Seattle, the other one on workers' rights where the alums at — UW Law showed up. On the subject of Seattle, how did you all identify the challenges for Seattle? What are some new challenges that were not foreseen that have since surfaced?
AR: Yeah, so I think, again, you know, one of the challenges of this is that there's been a long period between the initial bid and winning the tournament and now, right?
AKB: How long was that?
AR: Yeah, six, seven years.
So, I just want to say that things have changed, right. And so, the world has changed. And so, what are the things that are different? Well, I think one of them is, of course, immigration, right, which is a federal issue, but again, I think there's just a challenge around the fact that you have, right, this is an international tournament, you have visitors and players coming from different countries, and so there's just, I think, been challenges around will visitors feel safe and secure?
There are communities, there are workers, right, and so there have just been open questions about, you know, what role will ICE play? So, again, I think it's been left to the host cities to sort of think about, “how can they sort of, you know, safeguard and make everybody feel safe and secure?” So, immigration, I think, you know, has risen to the top.
I've talked about this in other places, but I think one of the challenges of this sort of human rights implementation in this tournament is it's the largest tournament, right? We have 48 teams. It's diffuse, right? Qatar was one country, you know. We have three countries, all these host cities. People can be traveling all around, but there are different, I've been calling them zones of responsibility, right?
So, FIFA controls the stadium, right, and it also has protections for its partners, right, athletes — they call them accredited people — but, you know, staff members, etc. So, FIFA has kind of its responsibilities relating to human rights, and then everything going on, like fan fests or outside of the stadium, are left to host cities.
And I just want to clarify that I think there's often a lot of confusion. FIFA is one entity, but then the host cities are separate. And actually, in Seattle, as an example, the city of Seattle, and, you know, Mayor Wilson, of course, are doing what they need to do, I think, you know, about transportation or about, you know, law enforcement, but the local organizing committee, Seattle 2026, is just a small entity, right? It is not the city. It has limited budget. So, to expect it to sort of be able to deal with all of the different human rights issues that might arise, there's just a challenge, right? So, there are going to be gaps.
So, back to the issues. Immigration. I think peaceful assembly, like, will there be challenges given today's geopolitics around, you know, protest, right? And then LGBTQ, you mentioned, so it's Pride Month in Seattle right now, and as part of Pride Month, you know, there's going to be a Pride Day match.
Now, the two countries that were drawn, right — there was a random draw — were Egypt and Iran, and so those two countries did protest and say that they did not want the match to happen, you know, given the beliefs of the two countries. Now, there are different issues, right, which is, first of all, what a government says may not necessarily reflect what people believe in the country, but beyond that, and I think Seattle did stick to its plans, was to say similar to Qatar, where there was really this focus on, you know, respect local context and custom,
the same goes here, right? So, for Seattle, Seattle has Pride Month, right, so there's a lot about respecting the local context when fans come here.
AKB: You touched on a few questions that I had, and I guess I'll just kind of glom it all in. One was, like, what could go wrong? I think the zones of responsibility indicate that there could be some gaps, and you were interviewed in a recent article in the Northwest Asian Weekly about your role in assessing human rights preparations, and you mentioned that creating a plan and then putting the human rights plan into action are two very different things. So, what are some of the things that you anticipate when you made that remark?
AR: Immigration issues are ones that it's been difficult to deal with, because, again, it's a federal issue, and again Seattle's local organizing committee isn't a government entity, so, you know, what can it do? So, you're left hoping that, you know, already overextended networks, right, like, you know, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, or other kinds of organizations are going to be there to be able to assist.
I think, again, similarly, you don't know what's going to happen. You hope that people will know enough about their rights to sort of protest if they are going to protest peacefully, but we don't know what's going to happen. And, of course, we've seen in Seattle and other years, right, that there have been challenges when we do have protesters and we do have law enforcement, and things can sometimes go awry.
So, it's more like you can try to prevent and predict, but again, a lot of these things are not, you know, within any one person's or entity's control.
AKB: Right, this being the first human rights action plan, it's a legacy, as you mentioned, that will continue to be built on for future World Cups.
AR: Yes, and I think that, you know, the larger issue too is, so now we're in the, you know, it's go time, and so now that we're actually seeing the tournaments and the visitors are coming, there's a question of if somebody's harmed, and, you know, harm happens all the time, right?
So, there may be a visitor who feels discriminated against, there may be someone who's harassed within a stadium, so the question is, is the tournament, and is FIFA, and is Seattle ready to respond when people do say they have a problem? And so, there's both rapid response in the stadium, and then, you know, I and others will be working with FIFA to see kind of, there's a complaints app and portal, what's happening, and are those issues properly addressed.
Again, the scale of this tournament means that there's just more of everything, and hopefully it's more and safe, but we just don't know.
AKB: Right, and you mentioned that once the games start, you'll be by the minute monitoring the grievances that come in on this app-based portal for grievances. The Barer Institute also here at UW Law, some of the staff and faculty helped to create a, kind of, guidelines, just, kind of, like getting ahead of providing resources for the different kind of topical themes that may come up around human rights.
AR: With the Barer Institute, right, I've been really fortunate to involve students in engaging with stakeholders and research, along with staff and faculty, and we just produced something called Getting Help and Reporting Harm. It's what we call a playbook. So, Seattle 2026 has a bunch of resources on its website, and this one basically says, outside of real emergencies, like 911 where someone is injured, right, there are going to be any number of issues. Like, some workers might say we weren't paid our wages, or there were issues of our safety. Other people may say we suffered discrimination. We might have a complaint, or, you know, a fan might say I have a complaint against the police department. So, what we've done is we've provided basically a toolkit that says where do you go if you need assistance with these different kinds of issues, and so it's a pretty concise document, but we hope it's one that can at least help people find where they need to go and what the channels are.
AKB: Yeah, it's a great framework, and we're going to link to the playbook in our show notes as well. It was very well done. So, how, how is this getting paid for? What's the budget like, and where's the money coming from to provide remedy if someone is harmed?
AR: Well, that's the challenge. So, I want to say that, again, I'm hopeful, right. This is, again, a big experiment that, as much as people can criticize FIFA or criticize the tournament, we do need to see that, you know, the fact that human rights is even on the agenda, and that these cities are thinking about how to prevent harm is a step forward, and that we can hopefully continue to iterate.
But in terms of the money, that's been a big challenge. So, as I mentioned, like FIFA controls the stadium, FIFA also has corporate sponsors, and so FIFA has its own profit center. So, cities are really left, as host cities, to actually pick up the tab for lots of stuff.
So, cities were asked to come up with human rights action plans, but they weren't given additional money from FIFA for implementation, and this is the big challenge, right? So, anything that a city has to raise, they have to do separately, and I won't get into it, but there are lots of articles around how local sponsorship has been challenging because FIFA has its own corporate sponsors, and those corporate sponsors have a right to sort of not have competitors be local hosts. Meaning that, like, you know, if Coca-Cola has a beverage or coffee brand, then you don't want Starbucks as a local sponsor because it's a conflict, but that limits and has made it, I think, challenging for all these host cities to try to raise money.
A long way of my saying that, like, this is kind of unfunded, right? So, I think, again, Seattle has done a good job of saying how can we, kind of, you know, piggyback on what our existing channels and mechanisms are, and what realistically can be done well, like the Pride match, right, or other things that are meant to be kind of human rights positive along the way.
Little challenges have popped up, you know, around, like, for example, water was initially going to be permitted in the stadium, and now it's not, so it means that people will have to buy it. I think that was not a wise decision, but it's obviously above my pay grade, but it is a human rights issue, right? I mean, with heat, and, you know, we're talking workers, we're talking fans, you want them to be safe, you want them to not pass out from heat.
AKB: Right, yeah, human rights, it spans the gamut of so many different things, including, like, bullying, discrimination, illness and injury, and other things that you're going to be monitoring on the grievances that come in. What are some highlights, too, that have come out of the FIFA games preparations?
AR: So, I think for Seattle, I'll speak now locally, one of the big highlights has been in the workers' rights story, right, that there's a labor standards agreement that has been negotiated between the MLK Labor Council and the stadium, again around workers' rights and fair wages and other things. So, I think that has been celebrated by everybody.
Similarly, there have been real efforts. So, if we think about, you know, if you go to a concert or a game at a stadium, right, a lot of the workers that come in, you know, to work concessions or to do things are temp workers, right, that they're hired for those events, and there has often been temp staffing, right, those agencies obviously make a profit, then give a smaller amount to the workers.
So, for this World Cup, there was a real effort to help those types of workers unionize through cooperatives. Really interesting, through that they're able to, I think, compete with those temporary agencies, right, and to sort of provide better conditions and wages for those workers.
So, I think those kinds of legacies, the labor standards agreement, you know, thinking about these new kind of cooperative models are ones that hopefully are going to last for longer. So, I think that's really a great example.
AKB: Yeah, all these byproducts of the human rights plan also extend to, you know, our law students' involvement on something with such an international scale.
AR: Yeah, it's been really fun. So, I teach a course called Business, Social Responsibility and Human Rights, and normally I teach that by talking about the Amazons of the world, and, you know, global supply chains, and how human rights are important, right? You don't want a T-shirt that's made by a 10-year-old, right, somewhere in the world who is, you know, indentured, right?
AKB: Grossly underpaid.
AR: Yeah. And you want to make sure that, again, that, you know, business practices are sustainable. But for this year, I taught the course focused on the World Cup, so students were really able to meet great experts, you know, all the way from FIFA Zurich, and to think about the human rights issues relating to mega sporting, but to also think about it in the context of not only global but local, and that's the best, right, to sort of think about your own community.
So, very exciting. And then we, of course, did look at the LA Olympics, and kind of looking forward, and the World Cup will be going to countries like Morocco and to Saudi Arabia, so thinking forward about kind of what next in this area.
But sports is a universal thing, right? I mean, I love soccer, so for me this has been exciting, but it's something that I think so many students can relate to, right? Because it's just part of many people's lives, and that's hopefully, and I want to say that, you know, now to touch on something different for a moment, which is to say that I think Seattle has done a really good job. There's been a lot of focus on youth soccer, creating more mini, what they call mini pitches, and pitches throughout the state. There was a big push to get tickets for young people to go to the games, so I think, you know, that's a really positive legacy.
AKB: It sounds like as much preparation as could go into this, for the first time ever, that the FIFA World Cup Seattle is in good hands.
AR: Yes, I hope so.
AKB: So, thank you so much for your time, and for sharing your expertise with us on this, like, landmark action human rights plan for the city of Seattle, and all the other host cities that are hosting the World Cup games this summer. Thank you so much for joining us.
AR: My pleasure.
AKB: Professor Anita Ramasastry is the endowed chair for the Barer Institute for Leadership in Law and Global Development at the University of Washington School of Law.
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