Qatar's death row and the invisible migrant workforce deemed unworthy of due process 19/01/2023, 10:36 These latest findings on Qatar are part of our wider Mapping Death Row project which we are compiling on the prevalence and experiences of foreign nationals under sentence of death, or executed, in the Middle East and Asia between 2016 and 2021. So far, we have gathered information on 1,240 cases, including 625 from the Gulf region, 330 of whom were from South Asia. The vulnerability of a foreign national arrested abroad is recognised in international law with the UN’s Vienna Convention on Consular Relations 1963. Qatar acceded to this convention in 1998, which mandates that, when a foreign national is arrested, detained, or pending trial in another state, the authorities of the host nation must inform the individual without delay that they are entitled to have consular officials informed of their detention, and if they request it, the consulate must be notified immediately. But our research has found that the Qatari authorities do not honour this agreement in practice. We have found that this occurs across the Gulf for people like Chaudhary – migrant workers found guilty of crimes without having access to lawyers who speak their own language and executed without appropriate post-conviction review processes or assistance. This story is part of Conversation Insights The Insights team generates long-form journalism and is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects to tackle societal and scientific challenges. Astonishingly, Qatar has the highest ratio of migrants to citizens in the world: migrant workers make up 94% of the country’s labour force and 86% of the total population. Indeed, the population of Qatar has grown by 40% since the announcement of the World Cup bid in 2010, largely from unskilled migrant workers. Yet those migrant workers – mostly from Nepal, India and Bangladesh – are a highly transient and exploited population. Our new evidence also shows that the capital crimes for which migrant workers are convicted across the Gulf region as a whole are inextricably connected to their precarious migratory and economic situations. Damning evidence has emerged about the abuse of migrant workers, particularly those working on the World Cup infrastructure, who have died because of extreme working and living conditions (typically from heat, exhaustion, insufficient food and water, inadequate medical provision, and poor safety regulations). Read more: World Cup 2022: Fifa's clampdown on rainbow armbands conflicts with its own guidance on human rights https://theconversation.com/qatars-death-row-and-the-invisible-migrant-workforce-deemed-unworthy-of-due-process-191017 Page 3 of 12