The Kafala Death Ledger

Every Pakistani government has negotiated with Riyadh over remittances, defence, and energy. None has asked for a cause-of-death clause.

Abdul Wali Skandar Khan was twenty-five years old. He was a civil engineer and the father of two children. On December 28, 2023, a guardrail collapsed at the NEOM construction site in Saudi Arabia. He fell. He was working for China Comserve, a contractor on the project. Saudi authorities did not conduct an investigation. The company did not organise repatriation of his body. His brother, who holds dual British-Pakistani citizenship, flew to Saudi Arabia at his own expense and spent weeks negotiating with hospitals, police, and the employer to retrieve the body. China Comserve had promised him both compensation and access to CCTV footage of the incident. Neither arrived.

Khan’s brother told the Wall Street Journal that Tabuk Hospital refused to release the body without a police report. When he approached China Comserve, the company told him NEOM was responsible for logging the death, not the police. China Comserve eventually wrote an incident report, which Khan took to police, who then issued a letter to the hospital. Abdul Wali Skandar Khan was finally returned to Pakistan. His family received no compensation. His death, as far as any Saudi government record is concerned, is a resolved matter.

The Numbers Behind the Name

In 2024, Pakistan sent 727,381 workers abroad. Of those, 452,562 went to Saudi Arabia. Another 81,587 went to Oman. Another 64,130 went to the UAE. Another 40,818 went to Qatar. Another 25,198 went to Bahrain. Over 62% of all Pakistani labour migration in 2024 went to Saudi Arabia alone, making it the single largest bilateral labour destination in Pakistan’s recorded migration history. In the same period, remittances from the Gulf carried the current account: Pakistan received $20.8 billion in the first seven months of fiscal year 2025, a 31.7% increase over the prior year.

The Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment is an attached department of the Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development. It maintains annual outflow statistics by country and skill category. It also maintains a register of worker deaths abroad, recorded when bodies are repatriated or when death notifications arrive from host country authorities.

The register records that a worker died. It records the country. It does not record the cause of death, because Saudi Arabia does not provide cause-of-death information to sending countries through any formal bilateral mechanism. The death certificate a family receives is issued by the Saudi Ministry of Interior. It carries one of two classifications: natural or accidental. Whether a worker fell from a scaffold, suffered heat stroke at forty-six degrees Celsius, or was killed when a guardrail collapsed at NEOM, the Ministry of Interior classification determines whether compensation is owed, not the treating physician’s records.

The ministry does not publish the death register as a ratio against placements. Placements are announced. Deaths accumulate in a separate table.

What Classification Produces

In 2025, Human Rights Watch published findings from interviews with families of 31 deceased migrant workers from Bangladesh, India, and Nepal who had died in Saudi Arabia between the ages of 23 and 52. The report documented deaths from falls, electrocution, and decapitation in industrial equipment. Across its case record, it found that deaths classified as natural by Saudi authorities were neither investigated nor compensated. The classification itself closed the compensation claim.

FairSquare’s July 2025 report examined in detail the deaths of 17 Nepali men in Saudi Arabia in 2023 and 2024. One, named Bhujel, worked as a machine operator for Samsung C&T on the NEOM tunnel project. Five days before he died, he vomited large amounts of blood at work and was taken to hospital by ambulance. The hospital issued a death certificate noting pulmonary tuberculosis as a diagnosis made two days before his death. The Saudi Ministry of Interior death certificate said: natural death. His family received no compensation. The recruitment firm stated that a natural classification meant they were not liable.

Bhujel was Nepali. He worked on the same site type, under the same legal classification system, in the same regulatory environment as the 452,562 Pakistani workers in Saudi Arabia in 2024. His death certificate is a specimen of the instrument Pakistan’s workers carry home in boxes, or that their families are told exists somewhere in Riyadh’s bureaucratic chain.

The sequence, in most cases, runs this way: the employer or accommodation supervisor notifies local authorities; Saudi police or civil defence attend; a cause-of-death classification is entered, typically without post-mortem, typically without independent witness. Deaths that produce no obvious external trauma, including heat exhaustion, cardiac failure from overwork, and respiratory failure from chemical exposure, are classified as natural. The post-mortem that would distinguish these from workplace deaths is not conducted. The death certificate the family receives at Karachi or Lahore airport carries no information about what actually happened. No attending physician’s notes accompany it. No incident report is attached.

The BEOE receives a notification. A number is updated.

The Kafala Architecture

The kafala system ties a worker’s legal status to a specific employer. A Pakistani laborer in Saudi Arabia cannot change jobs without his employer’s consent, cannot access the Saudi labour tribunal without his employer’s cooperation, and in many categories cannot leave the country without his employer’s exit permit. A worker who reports a colleague’s death risks the relationship that legally anchors his presence in the country. A family in Bahawalpur who wants to dispute cause of death must hire a Saudi lawyer, which costs more than the dead man earned before he died.

The kafala system has been modified incrementally since 2021 under pressure from international labour organisations, the lead-up to the 2034 World Cup, and mounting international scrutiny of NEOM and the Saudi giga-projects. The modifications have primarily addressed job-transfer restrictions and end-of-service documentation. The cause-of-death classification mechanism, and the Ministry of Interior’s role in producing death certificates that foreclose compensation claims, has not been reformed.

Before a worker reaches Saudi Arabia, he is already in debt. Recruitment agencies in Pakistan charge placement fees ranging from sixty thousand to over one hundred thousand rupees. A construction laborer at Pakistan’s floor-level wages, around eighteen thousand rupees per month, spends three to seven months of theoretical earnings on the fee before earning his first riyal. He borrows from relatives, from money-lenders, from microfinance institutions at rates between 20% and 45% annually. He arrives in Saudi Arabia carrying debt, tied to the employer under kafala, unable to leave the arrangement without formal consent. If he dies and his death is classified as natural, his family inherits the debt and the death certificate together.

What the Bilateral Record Shows

Pakistan has labour agreements with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain. These agreements establish recruitment terms, nominal wage protections, and dispute resolution mechanisms. None of them, in any publicly available version, establish a mechanism by which Pakistan receives cause-of-death information for workers who die on the job. The Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis has not published a formal request for cause-of-death disclosure. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not named this as a bilateral priority in any public communication consulted for this piece.

On September 17, 2025, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman signed the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement at Al-Yamamah Palace in Riyadh. The agreement commits both states to treat any act of aggression against one as an act against both. It institutionalises joint committees, intelligence sharing, and training programmes. It formalises a security partnership that predates CPEC and postdates every Pakistani government that sent workers to the Gulf without asking how they die. The agreement does not contain a labour rights clause. It does not require cause-of-death reporting for migrant worker deaths. It was not described by any official on either side as an occasion to raise worker welfare.

The Overseas Employment Corporation, a state-owned enterprise, recruits workers for Gulf placements. Its annual reports describe placements. They do not describe outcomes. The ministry’s communications about 2024 emphasised the 727,381 figure as evidence of successful facilitation, crediting “aggressive marketing strategies, improved facilitation, and stronger ties with international employers.” The workers who died in 2024 appear in a column of a table that the ministry does not distribute to journalists.

The Unregistered Dead

The BEOE’s death register covers officially registered workers. A substantial portion of Pakistani labour migration to the Gulf bypasses official registration: workers who enter on visit visas and secure work informally, workers who overstay and continue irregularly, and workers who move through private agent networks and never register with a Pakistani consulate. Their exact number is unknown because they bypass registration. Estimates drawn from remittance volumes and consular records suggest the gap between official BEOE outflow figures and the actual Pakistani labour population in Gulf countries is large.

When an unregistered worker dies, notification to Pakistan is less reliable still. His employer has no formal obligation to notify the Pakistani embassy. His body may not be repatriated. His family may receive a phone call and then silence. His death does not enter the BEOE’s register. He does not become a number in the table.

Bangladesh, which runs a comparable volume of official labour migration, repatriated 4,813 worker bodies in 2024, up from 4,552 in 2023. Bangladesh’s Wage Earners’ Welfare Board publishes these figures because it disburses a burial and transportation payment against each body, creating an administrative record. Pakistan does not have an equivalent public mechanism that produces an equivalent quality of public record. The Pakistan-specific death figure for 2024 exists in the BEOE’s internal register and requires direct retrieval from beoe.gov.pk. It has not been published in a format that allows easy comparison with the placement figures that dominate ministerial communications.

The Calculation That Was Made

Pakistan sent 452,562 workers to Saudi Arabia in 2024. The state knows this number. It does not know, and has not formally requested, how many of them died, under what circumstances, or whether the death certificates their families received accurately reflected cause of death.

This is not a passive gap. Abdul Wali Skandar Khan’s brother had to fly to Riyadh at his own expense to recover a body that a Pakistani consulate could not retrieve. He had to negotiate between a hospital, a police station, and a Chinese construction company to generate the paperwork that should have existed automatically. Pakistan has a consulate in Riyadh. The consulate processed Khan’s repatriation documents. At no point did the Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis publish a statement about the case, demand an investigation from Saudi authorities, or raise the NEOM contractor’s failure to report the death with the Saudi government.

The bilateral agenda between Islamabad and Riyadh covers investment flows, energy supply, defence commitments, and remittance facilitation. The families in Muzaffargarh and Dera Ismail Khan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who receive bodies carrying certificates stamped natural are not parties to that agenda. They are at the end of the supply chain. The state calculated, implicitly and across successive governments, that 452,562 placements per year is worth more than the information about what happens to those workers.

That calculation has never been published, debated, or voted on. It has simply been repeated, year after year, in the absence of any minister formally asking Riyadh for the number.

The Open Question

The FairSquare report published in July 2025 concluded that the surge in Saudi construction associated with NEOM and the 2034 World Cup will lead to thousands of unexplained deaths of low-paid foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia’s migrant worker population grew by 40% to 13.2 million in the five years to 2024. Pakistan supplies a substantial portion of that population, concentrated in the construction and labour categories most exposed to the deaths FairSquare documented.

The open question is not whether Pakistani workers die in Saudi Arabia. They do. The question is which ministry, across thirty years of organised migration to the Gulf, has ever formally required Saudi Arabia to report cause of death to Pakistan for every worker who dies there, as a condition of continued labour supply, and what answer it received.