China is host to the 2022 Winter Olympics with rumblings of a boycott and calls to move the games from Beijing because of alleged human rights violations.
International Olympic President Thomas Bach was presented with that demand ahead of the body's executive board meeting in Switzerland on Wednesday by a coalition of human-rights groups representing Tibet, Uighurs in China's Xinjiang region, Hong Kong and others. In a letter, the group asked the IOC to "reverse its mistake in awarding Beijing the honour of hosting the Winter Olympic Games in 2022.
The International Olympic Committee argued the 2008 Olympics would transform China and improve its human rights record. Instead, they are often compared to Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics; an authoritarian state using the games as a stage. After European cities such as Oslo and Stockholm dropped out, the IOC was left with only two bidders for 2022: Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Beijing won by four votes, taking the Winter Olympics to a country with no tradition -- but a giant, untapped market.
The IOC included human-rights requirements in the host city contract for the 2024 Paris Olympics, but it did not include those guidelines -- the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights -- for Beijing. Paris is the first Olympics to contain the standards, long pushed for by human-right groups.
Murray Hiebert, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that such countries don't want to jeopardize their economic ties with China, including the infrastructure investment they get. Mary Harvey, the CEO of the Swiss-based Centre for Sport and Human Rights, said athletes protesting against racism and inequality in the United States should have the same rights in Beijing, or in Tokyo.
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