Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:13 pm on 13 December 2022.
Well, Llywydd, I thank the Member for that further question. Let me give him two examples of ways in which we will want to follow up our presence at the world cup in the areas that he mentions. So, I said in my original answer that there would be cultural follow-up to the visit. I was able to visit the Museum of Islamic Art while I was in Qatar. It's a most fantastic museum, and one of the most striking things about it is that it is run, at a senior level, almost exclusively by women, and that is undoubtedly unusual in Qatar. But the director general of the museum is a woman. Her two deputies were both women. And we want to do anything we can to encourage that sort of development. So, we will invite a group of young women educators involved in the museum service in Qatar to come to Wales in the summer of next year, and then we will have an exchange in return of young women from Wales visiting the museum service in Qatar. And that is a practical example of the way in which we can use the contacts that we've made and the platform that there is there now in order to advance some of the desirable outcomes that Joel James mentioned.
As far as workers' rights are concerned, before going to Qatar I met with the International Trade Union Confederation and, while in Qatar, my colleague Vaughan Gething met with the International Labour Organization. Those are the two organisations that have come together on the ground to try to improve the rights of workers in that part of the world. They both said to us that progress had been made—not enough, not quickly enough and with anxieties about that progress being entrenched when the eyes of the world are no longer on Qatar.
One of the ways, the practical ways, in which we can help to make that happen is through the migrant worker centre that the FAW and others are trying to make sure is guaranteed to be in Qatar after the world cup moves away. We will support them in that because while new rights have been established, those rights are not relevant if people don't know about them or know how to make sure that they are realised in their own places of work. A migrant workers centre would be somewhere where incoming workers could go, could be sure they are fully armed with all the new rights that exist, would know what means of redress exist if those new rights are not realised, and somewhere to go back to if they need further help in the future. They are just two practical actions, Llywydd, that follow on from the decision to attend the world cup in Qatar, in what was always a difficult and closely balanced decision, that show that there will be genuine advances that we will continue to be able to assist with when the world cup itself is over.