What They're Saying: Craig Foster

• by Soccer America , Jan 28, 2019

"The human rights policy of FIFA is an incredibly important tool in this situation, and we're delighted that FIFA has demonstrated again their commitment to ensuring that every stakeholder in football will apply the absolute maximum leverage. [Over] the next five days we want to see absolute progress, and that means Hakeem Al-Araibi being released. We feel the urgency and emergency of the matter is so grave right now that all of sport has come out in favor of Hakeem."

-- Former Australia captain Craig Foster, on the case of al-Araibi, a former Bahrain national team player with refugee status in Australia who was detained two months ago while honeymooning in Thailand, where Bahrain is pressing ahead with plans to extradite him to serve a 10-year sentence on trumped up charges of vandalism. Foster went to Zurich to meet with FIFA general secretary Fatma Samoura. (Al-Araibi has criticized Bahraini Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa, the Asian Football Confederation president, for his involvement in human-rights crackdowns in Bahrain.) (AAP-SBS)