NGOs urge Fifa and Qatari authorities to grant fair appeal trial to former Qatar 2022 employee Abdullah Ibhais, who was convicted of bribery
Rights groups are calling on Qatari authorities and football’s governing body Fifa to ensure a fair trial for a World Cup organising committee whistleblower whose case is heading to Qatar’s Court of Cassation, after seeing what they say is flawed evidence from his most recent appeal.
Abdullah Ibhais, a former employee at the 2022 Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, was arrested in November 2019 and sentenced to jail last April over allegations of bribery and misuse of funds.
Ibhais has previously claimed that he was being persecuted for criticising the handling of a strike by migrant workers in Qatar in August 2019.
Qatari authorities upheld his conviction on 15 December, though it reduced the sentence from five to three years.
Analysis of the appeal judgement, which was made available in January, revealed that there were serious violations of Ibhais’s right to a fair trial, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Fair Square said in a joint report on Wednesday.
The rights groups said that the appeal court's judgement relied on evidence against the employee that was obtained from a confession which he later retracted in court.
Ibhais has stated that his confession was extracted under coercion by interrogators, who said that he would face serious state security charges if he did not admit to the accusations of misuse of state funds and...
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