Amnesty International urges FIFA World Cup host countries to uphold human rights

Amnesty Worldwide on Monday urged FIFA, nationwide soccer associations, and 2026 FIFA World Cup sponsors to ensure human rights of followers, gamers, journalists, employees, and native communities are preserved through the event, which is able to start June 11 in Canada, Mexico, and the US.

The rights group reminded host nations of their obligations below worldwide human rights legislation, highlighting ongoing “acute human rights disaster” within the host nations:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Safety (CBP) and different companies have been remodeled right into a paramilitary-style operation, which has concerned masked, armed federal brokers breaking down doorways and into houses with out warrants and arbitrarily arresting, detaining, abusing, and killing group members throughout the USA.

Amnesty quantified ICE’s abuse, detailing how 43 individuals died in ICE custody between January 2025 and March 2026. The group recounted ICE killings of Renée Good, Keith Porter, Ruben Ray Martinez, Silverio Villegas González, and Alex Pretti throughout operations in main cities throughout the county, in addition to the five hundred,000 individuals deported from the US in 2025.

The group alerted to the truth that the company has “signed 1,544…agreements with state and native legislation enforcement companies, together with in World Cup host cities Dallas, Houston and Miami, deputizing their officers to implement immigration legislation and permitting for native jails for use for immigration detention.”

Amnesty expressed concern over missing ensures from US authorities that immigrant communities attending the video games will likely be secure from ethnic profiling, illegal detention and deportation. Followers from Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, Iran, and Senegal will seemingly not be capable to journey to US to assist their groups, and different followers might face intrusive surveillance and wish to make sure that their social media accounts don’t promote “anti-Americanism.”

The group additionally warning of waning journalistic freedom within the US and Mexico. At the least one journalist–Mario Guevara–was deported from the US after he reported on ICE operations. In Mexico, seven journalists have been reportedly killed in retaliation to their reporting in 2025, and Reporters With out Borders has described the nation as essentially the most harmful on the earth for press members.

Rights to peaceable meeting have additionally suffered in all three host nations. In 2025, the Trump administration revoked the visas of 8,000 college students visas, a few of whom had protested Israeli occupation and navy motion in Gaza. In Canada, some cities have restricted areas for lawful protest by means of carried out “exclusion zones.”

The 2026 FIFA World Cup figures to be largest and most profitable up to now, projecting to generate $11 billion.