Olympics haven't helped China's human rights: report

By Aileen McCabe | canada.com - where perspectives connect
July 06, 2008

With just one month to go before the opening ceremony, it is increasingly obvious worldwide efforts to use the Beijing Olympics to hold China's feet to the fire on human rights have floundered.

A 71-page report outlining violations of press freedom in China released Monday by Human Rights Watch is the latest indication that hosting the Games was not enough of a lever to convince the Beijing government to improve its sad rights record.

Proponents and critics of the Beijing Games agreed on one thing - that fewer restrictions for international media and scrutiny of China at this time would constitute progress, Sophie Richardson, HRW's Asia advocacy director said.

Yet the Chinese government, with the help of the International Olympic Committee, has done its best to impede progress. Talk of an Olympic boycott to pressure Beijing on rights never gathered wide support, but it fizzled totally last week when U.S. President George W. Bush said he would attend the opening ceremony on Aug. 8.

Following his announcement, French media reported President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has hemmed-and-hawed about boycotting, would also attend. Sarkozy's office did not deny the story and a disappointed Robert Menard, head of Reporters Without Borders, said in a television interview on the weekend: "This is a stab in the back of Chinese dissidents. This is truly cowardly and is the opposite of what one expects from France."

Hordes of world leaders, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, are not going to the opening ceremony. But like Harper, most have taken some pains to make it clear their absence is not a boycott.

Over the past year, Beijing has made a few concessions to human rights concerns, almost certainly because it is hosting the Olympics.

When Hollywood director Steven Spielberg withdrew as a consultant to the opening ceremony to protest China's involvement in Darfur, China made some effort to bolster international attempts to rein in the rogue government.

And, this spring, after protests over the crackdown in Tibet reached a crescendo worldwide that threatened to affect the Games, China re-opened talks with representatives of the Dalai Lama.

But, as in the case of media freedom, which was the sole "rights" guarantee China actually gave the International Olympics Committee (IOC) when it was awarded the Games, progress on those files is spotty, at best.

The HRW report documents dozens of cases where the Chinese have harassed, intimidated and impeded foreign journalists in direct violation of its promise to allow free access nationwide to foreign reporters in the run-up to the Games.

The most egregious example is the closure of Tibet to foreign journalists following the violent protests in March, but HRW cites case after case where reporters working on environmental, health or industrial stories were also hassled, roughed-up or detained by security officials. It lists incidents where they were simply talking to disgruntled citizens and their notes or pictures were confiscated and their sources intimidated. In many, if not all of these cases, the reporters appealed to Beijing to live up to the guarantees it gave the IOC, but they were ignored.

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