Human rights activists criticize the IOC for disregarding their concerns as calls for boycotting the 2022 Beijing Olympics continue

Over the last few days, there was a renewed campaign calling on countries to boycott the 2022 Beijing Olympics worldwide. U.S. senator Mitt Romney called on the United States to boycott the Olympic game in Beijing through economic and diplomatic means while several human rights activists who met with officials from the International Olympic Committee accused them of ignoring their pledges.

With less than a year to go until the start of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, there are renewed calls to boycott the game around the world. Last week, Thomas Bach, the chief of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), called on countries not to boycott the game, describing the potential move as a move to “punish” the athletes.

Bach reiterated the IOC’s political neutrality and said it was up to governments to live up to their responsibilities. He claimed that the IOC is seriously monitoring the human rights situations in China and emphasized that human rights and labor rights were included in the agreement signed between the IOC and the host city.

“Within the remit of the IOC we are taking this very seriously, this means, with everything that is related to the Olympic Games: human rights and labor rights and others are and/or will be part of the host city contract and on this, we are working very closely with the organizing committee,” Bach said.

“We are not a super world government where the IOC could solve or even address issues for which not the UN Security Council, nor the G7, nor G20 has a solution. This is in the remits of politics.”

However, his comments triggered more dissatisfaction from foreign politicians and human rights activists. American politician Mitt Romney published a relevant opinion piece in the New York Times on Monday, claiming that the right answer to criticizing China is to launch an economic and diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics. He said prohibiting athletes from competing in China can be counterproductive.

“Prohibiting our athletes from competing in China is the easy, but wrong, answer,” wrote Romney. “Our athletes have trained their entire lives for this competition and have primed their abilities to peak in 2022. It would be unfair to ask a few hundred young American athletes to shoulder the burden of our disapproval.”

“It’s a very complicated world”

Members of the “No Beijing 2022” campaign held a virtual press conference on March 12, criticizing the IOC for failing to fulfill their promises of sharing documents about the assurances provided by China.

Frances Hui, a Hong Kong activist who met representatives from the IOC last October, said when she mentioned more than 10,000 protesters in Hong Kong have been arrested in just a year and how China has been violating its international human rights obligations, representatives from the IOC only responded by saying that “it’s a very complicated world.”

“When I asked them how they are going to legitimize a game that sets its base in a country practicing genocide and murdering, the IOC responded again by saying that ‘it’s a complex world,” Hui said. “We got out of the meeting with disappointment obviously, because all they did was to ‘gloss over the historical reality and to disregard us.”

Zumretay Arkin, the spokesperson of the World Uyghur Congress, also attended the meeting held last October. She said when they met with representatives from the IOC, they hoped the officials could listen to their voices. However, the officials “completely dismissed their experiences and suffering” while hiding conveniently behind “political neutrality,” according to Arkin.

“They repeatedly told us that the IOC’s mission is to create a better world, which is a world without discrimination based on race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation,” Arkin said. “But for us, a better world means a free and democratic world where there are no camps, no forced labors, no cultural and religious oppression, and no arbitrary arrest. A better world is a world without genocide.”

“The IOC failed to learn from the mistakes in 2008”

Chinese human rights lawyer Teng Biao talked about how the IOC used to claim that hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics would allow China to become more open. But according to him, Beijing continued to violate human rights during the Olympics in 2008 and he was personally banned from teaching and traveling, as well as being abducted and tortured by Chinese police.

“When Beijing won the right to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in 2015, the human rights situation in China has dramatically deteriorated,” Teng said. “Beijing didn’t keep its promises and they didn’t want to keep its promises. What Beijing has been doing is the opposite. They ratified more than two dozen international human rights treaties, but they didn’t respect them at all.”

Gloria Montgomery, the campaign coordinator at the International Tibet Network, said during last October’s meeting, representatives from the IOC didn’t realize the mistakes that they had made during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

“They talked about ‘the Olympic blue sky’ during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but China remains one of the major CO2 emitters around the world,” said Montgomery. “I’m not sure what environmental legacy the IOC was referring to. Additionally, a Tibetan activist was sentenced to 7 years in prison for raising environmental concerns in 2019.”

Montgomery said representatives from the IOC also repeatedly claimed that Beijing has reassured them that they would “be on their best behaviors.” “The IOC argued during the meeting that nothing is telling the world that what Beijing promised in 2015 wouldn’t be delivered in 2022,” she said.

“When we asked the IOC to provide evidence related to Beijing’s assurances, they said they would share the information with us later. However, no email came and now it’s been five months.”

In fact, the U.S. Olympic Committee already said last week that they wouldn’t support boycotting the 2022 Beijing Olympics, as they think the move would hurt athletes who have been training for the game. However, Montgomery said their campaign has actually been calling for a multi-stage method to carry out the boycott.

“We have been calling for the game to be moved rather than that the game shouldn’t take place,” Montgomery said. “We have also been calling for a corporate sponsors’ boycott and a consumer’s boycott. That’s very different from calling for the game to not happen.”

Zumretay Arkin from the World Uyghur Congress said when some human rights activists tried to meet with the German Olympic Committee, the committee said they would consider organizing a briefing with athletes to talk about the violations happening in China.

“This is a route that we will be pursuing in the near future, by engaging with athletes and letting them hear our concerns,” said Arkin. “We don’t want to push anyone to do things that will put their own lives at risk, but I think there are ways for them to be responsible just by hearing from us.”

The piece was first published in Mandarin on DW’s Chinese website.