Australia, Great Britain and Canada are boycotting the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022

Causes of human rights violations in China
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UK, Australia and Canada join Olympic boycott

The Winter Olympics are to be held in Beijing in February 2022.
Photo: dpa/zhang chenlin

Sydney Canada, Great Britain and Australia are emulating the US and will not send official government officials to Beijing for the Winter Olympics. What Germany does is open. There will be no federal president.

Even as more and more Western countries are joining the diplomatic boycott of the Olympic Winter Games in Beijing in 2022, new chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) has shown himself reluctant to answer the question. “The Olympic Games have always contributed to the coexistence of the world,” Scholz said after TV broadcaster Welt was elected as chancellor on Wednesday. “We’ll make a decision when they’re due.” The new government is talking to many others.

After the US, Canada, Great Britain and Australia also announced similar steps on Wednesday. “Canada is deeply disturbed by reports of human rights violations in China,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote via Twitter on Wednesday. It is “effectively a diplomatic boycott,” said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in parliament in London. “As I said earlier, we do not support sports boycotts. But there are no plans for cabinet members to participate in the Winter Olympics,” Johnson said.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had earlier made a similar statement in Sydney. He said the decision was “not a surprise” to him. He cited several misunderstandings between Canberra and Beijing as the reason, including China’s criticism of Australia’s decision to buy nuclear-powered submarines. His government again condemned “human rights violations in Xinjiang and other issues”, but the Chinese government showed no willingness to speak. Australian athletes – like British athletes – should attend the Games in Beijing, Morrison insisted.

China responded to heavy criticism of Down Under’s decision. “The Australian government blindly follows some countries so that it cannot differentiate between right and wrong,” Foreign Office spokesman Wang Wenbin said in Beijing on Wednesday. Australia violated the principle of political neutrality in the Olympic Charter. “Australia’s argument with the so-called human rights issue in Xinjiang is an excuse to defame China,” Wang Wenbin said. No one cares whether anyone comes or not.”

IOC chief Thomas Bach said the presence of government officials is a purely political decision for any government. The IOC’s principle of political neutrality also applies to this decision.”

Following the US push, European politician Nicola Beer (FDP) spoke out in favor of a complete boycott of the Winter Games. The European Union must “not only stay in the slipperiness of the United States, but also stand on its back legs to comply with human rights and speak out in favor of a complete boycott of the Winter Games”, the EU vice-president said. Parliament for the newspapers of “Funke Mediengruppe” (Wednesday).

The diplomatic boycott demanded by the United States is coming of late, the FDP politician said, and is “the lowest” that can be expected from the West. The February 2022 Winter Olympics in China are “a wrong stage in the wrong place”. Clear signals from the West toward Beijing are long overdue, Beer said, referring to the “brutal repression of the Uighurs, Chinese aggression against Hong Kong and Taiwan”.

CDU presidential candidate Friedrich Merz has also demanded such a move from the European Union. “The European Union should also take this decision. It will allow athletes to participate in the Olympics, but the regime in Beijing will be largely isolated politically,” the politician told news portal “T-Online” (Wednesday) told. The diplomatic boycott of the Games is justified due to the ongoing human rights violations in China.

The top of the new traffic light government, made up of the SPD, the Greens and the FDP, has so far left it open whether they will join the boycott. SPD general secretary Lars Klingbeil opposed this. “No, this is something that I view with great suspicion that the Olympic Games are being boycotted,” Klingbeal told radio station FFN. From his point of view, major sporting events are always “an opportunity to signal significant social development in a targeted way”.

Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is not flying for the Winter Games. “The federal president has no plans to visit Beijing,” said a spokesman for the federal president of ARD “Sportschau”. “These plans did not exist until the US announced its decision.”

The United States on Monday announced a diplomatic boycott of the Games in Beijing (February 4-22, 2022) to protest human rights violations in China. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said President Joe Biden’s administration would not send a diplomatic or official representative to Beijing.