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MPs urge British Olympians to boycott 2022 Beijing Winter Games
Lib Dem leader Ed Davey and Labour MP Chris Bryant urge officials and athletes to protest against oppression of Uighur communities
James Tapper
Sat 6 Feb 2021
Senior political figures have called for British athletes to boycott next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing in response to widespread human rights abuses in China.
Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, and Labour MP Chris Bryant, a member of the foreign affairs select committee and a former junior foreign minister, said the government and the British Olympic Association should act.
“The evidence that a genocide is now occurring in western China is so clear that the UK and the whole world must now stand up to Beijing and use every available tool to stop it,” Davey said.
The BBC reported last week that ethnic Uighur women and other Muslims in the western province of Xinjiang were being systematically raped and tortured. The former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said before leaving office last month that China was committing ongoing genocide against the Uighurs, a statement backed by the Biden administration.
The UN Genocide Convention lists removing children, preventing births, killing members of a group, seriously harming them or putting them in conditions calculated to destroy them as evidence of genocide.
Bryant said: “All five categories of genocide behaviour, according to the Genocide Convention, are already in play in Xinjiangprovince. So I think it’s just extraordinary that the British government seems to have no backbone about it.
“I just can’t see why anybody would want to go to the Winter Olympics in Beijing. And I think the British Olympic Association should be calling for the Winter Olympics to move, and if it doesn’t move, then we should be boycotting it.”
Ed Davey: ‘Team GB, ParalympicsGB and the government have a moral responsibility to consider if sending a team to these Games is really the right thing to do.’ Photograph: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor/PA
Davey said the UK had allowed its sports stars to be used for propaganda in the past, such as when the England football team was instructed to give a Nazi salute in 1935.
“No doubt we will hear teams, sponsors and governing bodies say the Olympics and Paralympics should be separate from politics and that they are just concentrating on sport. But in the face of genocide, that just isn’t good enough,” Davey said.
“The 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games will be used as a propaganda tool for a regime committing genocide. Team GB, ParalympicsGB and the government have a moral responsibility to consider if sending a team to these Games is really the right thing to do.”
He said that unless the Chinese government ordered the closure of detention camps in Xinjiang, ended Uighur forced labour and ethnic cleansing, stopped sterilising Uighur women and stopped the torture and rape of Uighurs, then Team GB, ParalympicsGB and ministers should announce a boycott. “Our brightest and best athletes should not be forced to be part of a propaganda exercise for the Chinese Communist party while it tries to wipe the Uighur people off the face of the planet.”
Last week, a group of 180 human rights groups called for a boycott, saying that the International Olympic Committee’s hope that awarding China the Games in 2015 would spark progress had been wrong.
China’s human rights record worsened after the 2008 Beijing summer Games because the country’s leadership became “emboldened”, the group said.
Fewer athletes participate in the Winter Olympics than during the summer Games and a greater proportion come from richer countries.
Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, told the foreign affairs select committee last October that a UK boycott of the Games was possible. The former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith has also called for a boycott.
China has denied there are any abuses in Xinjiang.
Sir Hugh Robertson, the chairman of the British Olympic Committee, said last year that Olympic boycotts did not work and only harmed the athletes who could not take part. British runners Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett won gold medals at the 1980 Moscow Games after defying a government boycott.
www.theguardian.com
Beijing 2022: 180 human rights groups call for Winter Olympics boycott
More than 180 organisations want countries to skip event as a way of demonstrating their opposition to China’s rights record
Helen Davidson in Taipei
@heldavidson
Thu 4 Feb 2021 05.32 GMT
More than 180 human rights organisations have called for a boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games in protest against China’s mass human rights abuses.
The coalition of groups – primarily regional associations in support of Tibet, Taiwan, the Uighur community and Hong Kong – said the hopes in 2015 that awarding Beijing the Games would be a catalyst for progress, had faded.
“Since then … President Xi Jinping has unleashed an unrelenting crackdown on basic freedom and human rights,” the group said, calling on governments to boycott the event to ensure it wasn’t used to “embolden” the Chinese government as they said the 2008 summer Olympics had done.
The open letter published this week said: “The IOC [ International Olympic Committee] refused to listen in 2008, defending its decision with claims that they would prove to be a catalyst for improved human rights. As human rights experts predicted, this decision proved to be hugely misplaced; not only did China’s human rights record not improve but violations increased substantially without rebuke.
US 'deeply disturbed' by reports of systematic rape in China's Xinjiang camps
Read more
“Now, in 2021, we find ourselves back in the same position with the IOC who are refusing to act despite the clear evidence of genocide and widespread and worsening human rights failures.”
China is under growing international pressure over its widely documented abuses and detention of Uighursand other ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang, as well as its crackdown on dissent domestically and in Hong Kong, surveillance and enforced labour programmes in Tibet, suppression of language and culture in Inner Mongolia, and aggressive posturing towards Taiwan.
In recent years its government and senior officials have been subjected to various sanctions and multilateral statements of condemnation, which have done little to change the behaviour.
But there appears little appetite from countries for a boycott, including in the US, which has formally declared that China’s abuses in Xinjiang to amount to genocide.
“We’re not currently talking about changing our posture or our plans as it relates to the Beijing Olympics,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said on Wednesday.
The US Olympic and Paralympic Committee said it believed it was more effective for governments to engage China directly on human rights concerns, and boycotts “have been shown to negatively impact athletes while not effectively addressing global issues”.
Asked about the letter, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, said at a regular press briefing “all Winter Games lovers are looking forward to taking part in the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics”.
“We are fully confident the Beijing Winter Olympics will be a splendid event. In the meantime I must point out that it is highly irresponsible for some parties to try and disrupt, intervene, and sabotage the preparation and holding of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games to serve their political interests,” Wang said.
“Such actions will not be supported by the international community and will never succeed.”
It came as Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused the IOC of failing its due diligence in not conducting a human rights risk assessment.
“The IOC knows the Chinese authorities are arbitrarily detaining Uighurs and other Muslims, expanding state surveillance, and silencing numerous peaceful critics,” said Sophie Richardson, HRW’s China director. “Its failure to publicly confront Beijing’s serious human rights violations makes a mockery of its own commitments and claims that the Olympics are a ‘force for good’.”
www.theguardian.com
Lib Dem leader Ed Davey and Labour MP Chris Bryant urge officials and athletes to protest against oppression of Uighur communities
James Tapper
Sat 6 Feb 2021
Senior political figures have called for British athletes to boycott next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing in response to widespread human rights abuses in China.
Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, and Labour MP Chris Bryant, a member of the foreign affairs select committee and a former junior foreign minister, said the government and the British Olympic Association should act.
“The evidence that a genocide is now occurring in western China is so clear that the UK and the whole world must now stand up to Beijing and use every available tool to stop it,” Davey said.
The BBC reported last week that ethnic Uighur women and other Muslims in the western province of Xinjiang were being systematically raped and tortured. The former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said before leaving office last month that China was committing ongoing genocide against the Uighurs, a statement backed by the Biden administration.
The UN Genocide Convention lists removing children, preventing births, killing members of a group, seriously harming them or putting them in conditions calculated to destroy them as evidence of genocide.
Bryant said: “All five categories of genocide behaviour, according to the Genocide Convention, are already in play in Xinjiangprovince. So I think it’s just extraordinary that the British government seems to have no backbone about it.
“I just can’t see why anybody would want to go to the Winter Olympics in Beijing. And I think the British Olympic Association should be calling for the Winter Olympics to move, and if it doesn’t move, then we should be boycotting it.”
Davey said the UK had allowed its sports stars to be used for propaganda in the past, such as when the England football team was instructed to give a Nazi salute in 1935.
“No doubt we will hear teams, sponsors and governing bodies say the Olympics and Paralympics should be separate from politics and that they are just concentrating on sport. But in the face of genocide, that just isn’t good enough,” Davey said.
“The 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games will be used as a propaganda tool for a regime committing genocide. Team GB, ParalympicsGB and the government have a moral responsibility to consider if sending a team to these Games is really the right thing to do.”
He said that unless the Chinese government ordered the closure of detention camps in Xinjiang, ended Uighur forced labour and ethnic cleansing, stopped sterilising Uighur women and stopped the torture and rape of Uighurs, then Team GB, ParalympicsGB and ministers should announce a boycott. “Our brightest and best athletes should not be forced to be part of a propaganda exercise for the Chinese Communist party while it tries to wipe the Uighur people off the face of the planet.”
Last week, a group of 180 human rights groups called for a boycott, saying that the International Olympic Committee’s hope that awarding China the Games in 2015 would spark progress had been wrong.
China’s human rights record worsened after the 2008 Beijing summer Games because the country’s leadership became “emboldened”, the group said.
Fewer athletes participate in the Winter Olympics than during the summer Games and a greater proportion come from richer countries.
Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, told the foreign affairs select committee last October that a UK boycott of the Games was possible. The former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith has also called for a boycott.
China has denied there are any abuses in Xinjiang.
Sir Hugh Robertson, the chairman of the British Olympic Committee, said last year that Olympic boycotts did not work and only harmed the athletes who could not take part. British runners Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett won gold medals at the 1980 Moscow Games after defying a government boycott.
MPs urge British Olympians to boycott 2022 Beijing Winter Games
Lib Dem leader Ed Davey and Labour MP Chris Bryant urge officials and athletes to protest against oppression of Uighur communities
Beijing 2022: 180 human rights groups call for Winter Olympics boycott
More than 180 organisations want countries to skip event as a way of demonstrating their opposition to China’s rights record
Helen Davidson in Taipei
@heldavidson
Thu 4 Feb 2021 05.32 GMT
More than 180 human rights organisations have called for a boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games in protest against China’s mass human rights abuses.
The coalition of groups – primarily regional associations in support of Tibet, Taiwan, the Uighur community and Hong Kong – said the hopes in 2015 that awarding Beijing the Games would be a catalyst for progress, had faded.
“Since then … President Xi Jinping has unleashed an unrelenting crackdown on basic freedom and human rights,” the group said, calling on governments to boycott the event to ensure it wasn’t used to “embolden” the Chinese government as they said the 2008 summer Olympics had done.
The open letter published this week said: “The IOC [ International Olympic Committee] refused to listen in 2008, defending its decision with claims that they would prove to be a catalyst for improved human rights. As human rights experts predicted, this decision proved to be hugely misplaced; not only did China’s human rights record not improve but violations increased substantially without rebuke.
US 'deeply disturbed' by reports of systematic rape in China's Xinjiang camps
Read more
“Now, in 2021, we find ourselves back in the same position with the IOC who are refusing to act despite the clear evidence of genocide and widespread and worsening human rights failures.”
China is under growing international pressure over its widely documented abuses and detention of Uighursand other ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang, as well as its crackdown on dissent domestically and in Hong Kong, surveillance and enforced labour programmes in Tibet, suppression of language and culture in Inner Mongolia, and aggressive posturing towards Taiwan.
In recent years its government and senior officials have been subjected to various sanctions and multilateral statements of condemnation, which have done little to change the behaviour.
But there appears little appetite from countries for a boycott, including in the US, which has formally declared that China’s abuses in Xinjiang to amount to genocide.
“We’re not currently talking about changing our posture or our plans as it relates to the Beijing Olympics,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said on Wednesday.
The US Olympic and Paralympic Committee said it believed it was more effective for governments to engage China directly on human rights concerns, and boycotts “have been shown to negatively impact athletes while not effectively addressing global issues”.
Asked about the letter, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, said at a regular press briefing “all Winter Games lovers are looking forward to taking part in the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics”.
“We are fully confident the Beijing Winter Olympics will be a splendid event. In the meantime I must point out that it is highly irresponsible for some parties to try and disrupt, intervene, and sabotage the preparation and holding of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games to serve their political interests,” Wang said.
“Such actions will not be supported by the international community and will never succeed.”
It came as Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused the IOC of failing its due diligence in not conducting a human rights risk assessment.
“The IOC knows the Chinese authorities are arbitrarily detaining Uighurs and other Muslims, expanding state surveillance, and silencing numerous peaceful critics,” said Sophie Richardson, HRW’s China director. “Its failure to publicly confront Beijing’s serious human rights violations makes a mockery of its own commitments and claims that the Olympics are a ‘force for good’.”
Beijing 2022: 180 human rights groups call for Winter Olympics boycott
More than 180 organisations want countries to skip event as a way of demonstrating their opposition to China’s rights record
living supporting and paying for your countries killing of innocent Muslims including Pakistanis these last few years .
