STRASBOURG: A report by the Council of Europe has urged world football federation FIFA to order a new vote on the award, back in December 2010, of the 2022 World Cup finals to the Gulf state of Qatar.

A draft resolution proposed by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) claimed that revelations about the bidding process meant  “FIFA cannot evade the obligation to hold a new vote.”

Michael Connarty,  the British Labour MP who drew up the draft resolution, attacked a “farce” and “a clear whitewash” in FIFA’s ethics investigation into the process.

Connarty said he believed documents obtained by The Sunday Times proved that Qatari Mohamed Bin Hammam, who had been president of the Asian Football Confederation, paid important sums of money to win the backing of African federations in the vote [This was to ignore the fact that individual federations did not have a vote on the issue],

He was also concerned that the Garcia report into the bid scandal had not yet been published in full and the PACE report was “amazed at the ease with which the adjudicatory chamber of the FIFA Ethics Committee confirmed the decision to assign the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.”

It added: “The claim that Qatar does not have direct responsibility for Mr bin Hammam’s dealings should not be allowed to validate a procedure so fundamentally undermined by illegality. FIFA does not yet seem capable of putting an end to corruption scandals.”

The report also called on Qatar, who have been severely criticised for the conditions of foreign workers to take “all necessary measures to secure respect for the fundamental rights of all foreign migrant workers employed in this country.”

The text of the resolution will be submitted to the Council of Europe’s plenary session in April which brings together more than 300 Parliamentarians from 47 member states.

A resolution from the Council of Europe, which is an advisory international organisation, is not binding.

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