DUBAI, 30 November 2006 — Dubai authorities announced yesterday that they have begun a crackdown on companies abusing migrant workers key to the city’s construction boom.

Public Health Director Salem Mesmar said a new municipality committee had ordered more than 100 labor camps in the Al-Muhaisna area shut.

The Committee for Environment and Health Affairs of Laborers in Dubai closed almost 20 percent of the 495 labor camps in the area, which were found to fall short of minimum standards in building, health services, sanitation and waste disposal, pest control, drinking water and other basic facilities.

The committee has established a technical task force from different departments to evaluate the conditions and the state of the buildings in some of the older labor camps.

The task force will also study the possibility of demolishing the buildings that cannot be maintained or renovated, or those that have random add-on features that have not received approval or been granted license.

The firms that own or run the camps have been given one year to provide replacement accommodation that meets international health and safety standards, Mesmar said in a statement.

“We have also ordered improvements to be made to the remaining camps,” he said in the statement.

The closures come two weeks after Human Rights Watch issued a report urging the United Arab Emirates to enforce laws designed to protect foreign workers the New York-based group said were widely abused by their employers.

Dubai, the Gulf’s main tourism and trade hub, is going through a construction boom propelled by windfalls from high oil prices.

— With input from agencies