MPs urge British Olympians to boycott 2022 Beijing Winter Games
Senior political figures have referred to as for British athletes to boycott subsequent 12 months’s Winter Olympics in Beijing in response to widespread human rights abuses in China.
Ed Davey, the chief of the Liberal Democrats, and Labour MP Chris Bryant, a member of the international affairs choose committee and a former junior international minister, mentioned the federal government and the British Olympic Association ought to 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 mentioned.
The BBC reported last week that ethnic Uighur girls and different Muslims within the western province of Xinjiang have been being systematically raped and tortured. The former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo mentioned earlier than leaving workplace final month that China was committing ongoing genocide towards the Uighurs, a press release backed by the Biden administration.
The UN Genocide Convention lists eradicating youngsters, stopping births, killing members of a bunch, significantly harming them or placing them in circumstances calculated to destroy them as proof of genocide.
Bryant mentioned: “All five categories of genocide behaviour, according to the Genocide Convention, are already in play in Xinjiang province. 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 mentioned the UK had allowed its sports activities stars to be used for propaganda up to now, reminiscent of when the England soccer staff 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 mentioned.
“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 mentioned that until the Chinese authorities ordered the closure of detention camps in Xinjiang, ended Uighur compelled labour and ethnic cleaning, stopped sterilising Uighur girls and stopped the torture and rape of Uighurs, then Team GB, ParalympicsGB and ministers ought to 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 fallacious.
China’s human rights report worsened after the 2008 Beijing summer time Games as a result of the nation’s management turned “emboldened”, the group mentioned.
Fewer athletes take part within the Winter Olympics than throughout the summer time Games and a higher proportion come from richer international locations.
Dominic Raab, the international secretary, instructed the international affairs choose committee final October that a UK boycott of the Games was possible. The former Conservative chief Iain Duncan Smith has additionally referred to as for a boycott.
China has denied there are any abuses in Xinjiang.
Sir Hugh Robertson, the chairman of the British Olympic Committee, mentioned final 12 months that Olympic boycotts didn’t work and solely harmed the athletes who couldn’t participate. British runners Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett received gold medals on the 1980 Moscow Games after defying a authorities boycott.
