BEIJING 2008 - The Olympic Games Come To China: Will Human Rights?

By Human Rights Watch
October 06, 2006

“How will China’s pervasive censorship and control of domestic and international media and the Internet play out when thousands of international journalists descend on Beijing? How are the Olympic Games being used to justify the violent forced evictions of thousands of people from their homes? As international businesses reach out to the world’s largest consumer market, how do China’s restrictions on labor rights affect workers on the ground? Human Rights Watch hopes that the 2008 Olympics will be an impetus for China to demonstrate greater respect for the human rights guaranteed to all under international law."

So wrote Human Rights Watch on August 24, 2004, a few days before the city of Athens, host to the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, handed the Olympic flag to Beijing, the 2008 host city. During the intervening two years, as our concerns have deepened, we have continued to ask ourselves, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and China’s leadership the same questions.

Will there be censorship at the Bejing olympics?
Chinese laws and regulations narrow the space for free expression by domestic and foreign press. Contrary to international law, which calls for “freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers,” news (Article 19, 1976) reports must largely repeat the government’s factual account and analysis, e-mail is selectively monitored and courts regularly sentence Chinese editors, webmasters, reporters and bloggers alleged to have leaked “state secrets,” “incited subversion,” or “colluded with hostile foreign forces” to prison terms as long as 12 years. Members of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) may not be charged with those offenses but they risk harassment and detention every time they try to cover what Chinese authorities consider a sensitive story, which can include a major traffic jam or an ozone-filled atmosphere (“Widespread Detentions of Foreign Journalists…”, 2006). Existing regulations already restrict where journalists can go and what stories they can cover.

For the 20,000 foreign journalists expected to cover the Beijing Olympics, the most pressing issue will be their freedom to report and analyze the Games without government interference (Kahn, 2006; Wu, 2006). Official accreditation of journalists for the Olympics might be used, as in the past, to reward journalists uncritical of Chinese government policies and to punish critics. Government ownership of almost all Olympic-related media infrastructure – outgoing and incoming wire-line and wireless communications, including telephone and Internet connections, international radio and television signals for broadcasting rights holders and transmission hardware for all television and radio broadcasts destined for international rights holders – will enable Chinese editing of offending broadcasts and interference with their transmission.

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