U.S. Sen. Rick Scott introduced a resolution Tuesday urging that the 2022 Winter Olympics be moved from Beijing because of China’s human rights violations.
China “should not be allowed to host the 2022 Olympic Games while simultaneously running concentration camps, violating human rights and systematically oppressing the people of Hong Kong,” Scott said in a statement. “I am proud to lead my colleagues to send a clear message to the IOC: stand up for freedom and urge Communist China to do the right thing, or find a new home for the 2022 Olympic Games.”
Republican U.S. Sens. Mike Braun, Marco Rubio, Todd Young, Tom Cotton, Jim Inhofe, and Marsha Blackburn joined Scott in sponsoring the resolution.
Rubio said both the Trump and Biden administrations have made it U.S. official policy that China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority in the western province of Xinjiang.
“It is insane that a country actively involved in egregious human rights abuses that amount to genocide would have the privilege of hosting the Olympics or any other international sporting event,” Rubio said in a statement.
Scott had previously called on NBC to refuse to air the 2022 Games.
It’s unclear how much support the position has in Washington and in the Olympic world, where memories of President Carter’s 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympics run deep.
Calls to move or boycott the competition “just haven’t really gotten traction among the people who actually decide whether or not to send Olympic teams to Olympic Games,” said Susan Brownell, an Olympics expert and University of Missouri-St. Louis professor.
Brownell said there haven’t been any major boycotts of the games in almost 30 years.
“That’s the broad consensus that has emerged over these decades,” she said. “Boycotts don’t really achieve anything except harm the athletes.”
But Scott spokesman McKinley Lewis said Scott was not calling for a boycott.
“This is about urging the IOC to move the Olympics to a nation that respects basic human rights and isn’t committing a genocide,” Lewis said. “You should ask the Democrats whether they’ll stand for human rights and support the resolution.”
In response, Democratic U.S. Rep. Darren Soto said, “While I don’t object to the resolution, I think there are more direct issues we need to address right now,” including the trade deficit, working with Europe and the UN to press for human rights reforms, and climate change.
U.S. Rep. Val Demings responded, “I continue to support a tough U.S.-led response to hold China accountable for ongoing human rights abuses, including the genocide of the Uyghurs, degradation of democracy in Hong Kong, and repression of Tibet.”
“I also call on my colleagues in the Senate to join us in addressing issues in our own back yard,” Demings said. “We must restore America’s moral leadership by reuniting separated children who were torn from their parents at the border, and pass immediate legislation to strengthen our democracy, secure the voting rights of all Americans, and end painful legacies of discrimination.”
Richard Lapchick, director of the DeVos Sport Business Management program at the University of Central Florida and president of the Institute for Sport and Social Justice, said sports is a legitimate tool for protest, adding that using it as political leverage has been very effective in the past.
“The battle against apartheid was largely won internationally because of a sports boycott of South Africa,” Lapchick said. “I’ve been trying to get athletes involved as activists over the last 50 years.”
But, he said, many notable efforts to move a major international sporting event because of human rights violations failed, including the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany and the upcoming World Cup in Qatar. And it’s unclear if a push to move the Olympics from Beijing would be any more successful.
“Qatar’s entire infrastructure for the games was built using people who had been trafficked from other parts of Asia, to build it in intolerable conditions,” Lapchick said. “There was a large cry to move it, and that didn’t happen. It’s very difficult to get a kind of global consensus on changing the venue of [an event] because of politics. … And China is such a powerful country.”
slemongello@orlandosentinel.com
