According to the Olympic Charter, the goal of Olympism is "to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity".
Yet there is no mechanism to ensure that this lofty ideal is upheld. Now that the torch has passed from Vancouver to London, there's a unique opportunity for the UK to bequeath to the Olympic movement a simple means of ensuring that the Games do indeed contribute to "the preservation of human dignity" through the protection of human rights.
Too often, the dark side of the Games has been ignored.
The low point for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was 1936, when the Olympics were held in Hitler's Berlin. But since 1945, rather than make amends, the IOC has continued to overlook abuse. In 1968, 10 days before the opening of the Mexico City Olympics, the army and police killed scores of student protesters in one of the main squares of Mexico's capital. The IOC went ahead with the Games regardless.
The Beijing Olympics in 2008 were a major setback for human rights in China. As Human Rights Watch has documented, thousands of Beijing residents were evicted from their homes to make way for the construction of Olympic sites, with no due process and no compensation. The Chinese government silenced and suppressed dozens of activists and critics of the Olympics such as Hu Jia and Liu Xiaobo. Many remain in prison. The government also imposed stringent media and internet censorship during the Games.
The IOC should not have been able to get away with the blatant sanitisation that allowed it to report that the Beijing Games were an "indisputable success".
And here's where London comes in. Ahead of 2012, the UK should establish a committee that would monitor and report on adherence of the host government to human rights benchmarks such as media freedom, labour rights, land rights, freedom of expression and civil liberties.
Such a committee would not only build confidence in our government's commitment to uphold the Olympic charter. It would also establish a precedent and put irresistible pressure on the IOC to establish its own permanent monitoring and review committee for future games. We have outlined our proposal in a letter to Olympics minister Tessa Jowell.
A permanent IOC monitoring committee would send a strong message to the Russians, who will be staging the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Quite apart from wider concerns about political repression in Russia, the potential for abuses directly related to the Sochi games is real. Human Rights Watch has already documented the suppression of peaceful protests during IOC visits.
The IOC is not a human rights organisation. Human Rights Watch does not expect it to solve all the human rights problems in a host city or country. We do, however, expect the hosts and the IOC to ensure that human rights violations do not occur as the result of the staging of the Olympics and that, where the Olympic movement has influence on specific rights, it uses it to prevent abuses.
By establishing a committee to monitor human rights benchmarks, London would give the IOC a powerful tool to do just that. We should not pass up that opportunity.
