[ad_1]
Nancy Pelosi, president of the U.S. House of Representatives, has become the highest-ranking U.S. politician to call for the diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics on human rights abuses. China a Xinjiang.
Pelosi urged the US and other nations not to send high-level delegations, in an attempt to increase pressure on the Chinese government over its persecution of Uyghurs, which the Biden administration has described as “genocide”.
“We can’t continue as if there is no problem if the Olympics go to China,” Pelosi said at a hearing on the Human Rights Commission of the House of Representatives of Tom Lantos. “The last three decades have made it clear that we cannot continue to give China blank control over the hope that its behavior will simply change.”
The Biden administration has held preliminary talks with allies, including the United Kingdom and Australia, on a diplomatic boycott, but officials say no decision has been made on the games. Last week the state department said the Chinese government had turned Xinjiang into one “Outdoor Prison” and that the Biden administration was reviewing its options to make sure it was not helping China use the games to achieve a propaganda victory.
Beijing has rejected widespread claims that it has confined more than a million Muslim Uighurs and other minorities in detention camps in the northwest region that in some cases are being used for forced labor.
A diplomatic boycott would mean that governments would refuse to send officials or heads of state to the Olympics, an option used by the US during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi to protest Russia’s anti-gay law.
“We are not honoring the Chinese government by getting the heads of state to leave for China,” Pelosi said.
Several Republican lawmakers have proposed a diplomatic boycott, but Pelosi, a longtime critic of China on its human rights record, is the most important member of Congress in pushing for the outcome.
“As Speaker of the House and someone who has worked on China and human rights issues for decades, it is very important,” said Sophie Richardson, director of Human Rights Watch in China.
“With the Chinese government doubling or not quadrupling human rights crimes, alongside the stubbornness and obfuscation of the International Olympic Committee, no one should be surprised by this result.”
Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who co-chairs the commission and wants the Games to move away from China, said he would call to testify before Congress to U.S. companies involved in sponsoring the Olympic Games. 2022.
“We will ask them to declare all the keys to the United States, especially Coca-Cola,” Smith told the Financial Times, adding that he also wanted to know about Mars, the only U.S. company to have a sponsorship deal with the committee. Beijing Olympic organizer, unlike the IOC.
“They may lose some money, but they have to realize that the money from a dictatorship that kills people is poorly generated profits.”
Recently, the FT contacted more than two dozen companies with Olympic sponsorship rights, but most rejected comment.
A spokesman for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee did not comment on Tuesday. But earlier it was said he opposed the boycott. The United States last took part in a large-scale boycott, in which it withdrew its delegation of athletes, to the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
[ad_2]
Source link
