Ten U.S. Senators tell the International Olympic Committee that China’s human rights violations are incompatible with the Olympic spirit – they will not be heard.
by Massimo Introvigne
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- The letter of December 5, 2019.
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- The letter of December 5, 2019.
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- The letter of December 5, 2019.
On December 5, 2019, ten influential U.S. Senators, including the former Presidential candidate Marco Rubio, wrote to the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thomas Bach, asking him to re-examine the decision to hold the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Bitter Winter publishes a copy of this letter, which speaks for itself.
The Senators note that in 2014 the IOC adopted the Olympic Agenda 2020, a document implying that Olympics should not be held in countries that do not comply with the accepted international standards on human rights.
The Senators also note that this decision came after controversies about the Beijing Olympics of 2008. Many had complained that the need to guarantee public order during the Olympics was used by the CCP regime as a pretext to further crack down on Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, Christians, and human rights activist.
There was also evidence that China had used child labor to quickly produce Olympic gadgets to be sold to visitors.
Will the IOC take action against China? Most probably it will not, and the Senators know why. The IOC has already decided that the Olympic Agenda 2020 will only become enforceable in 2024, coincidentally, two years after the Beijing Winter Olympics, which are connected to enormous commercial interests. The CCP will thus be left off the hook.
The Senators comment that human rights are also mentioned in IOC documents other than the Olympic Agenda 2020. But they know that nothing will happen. The billionaire CCP Olympic party will not be disturbed. But it is great time for those in the free world to rise up and denounce the scandal.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
