Pressure is mounting on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to call on the Chinese Communist regime to address its appalling human rights record in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
Former Australian Olympian swimmer Jan Becker has joined human rights groups in criticising China's failure to honour human rights promises, saying the IOC's reputation would be sullied if it did not address the matter.
Ms Becker, who represented Australia in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, said she had spoken to a number of Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) officials about Beijing's human rights violations, particularly the persecution of Falun Gong and the subsequent illegal organ harvesting.
The AOC officials assured her that "all that would change" and "human rights would improve". To date, she said, things had deteriorated, citing the construction of the Olympic site alone as an example of the present Chinese regime's hostility towards the most basic rights.
"Look at what is being done to host the sport, with people being driven from their homes and their homes being bulldozed to make way for the Olympics," Ms Becker said. "I don't think that is in the Olympic spirit – as what an Olympian would want – and if they were to know this they would feel quite sickened by it."
Ms Becker, who has been practising Falun Gong for over eight years, said the persecution of fellow practitioners was only one example of atrocities occurring against people in China.
"It is the Christians, the Uighurs the Tibetans – you can just go on and on," she said.
"World sporting bodies have to stand up and say [to China's regime]: 'You have to change if you want to be part of this.'"
Otherwise, she believes the IOC would experience the same humiliation that occurred after the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
"It reminds us of Berlin where everyone thought it was all great and wonderful, and then after World War II they found out what was actually happening," she said.
Recent reports suggest that China's authoritarian regime is becoming increasingly paranoid about any possible displays of dissent during the Olympics, rounding up any potential "troublemakers" at will and incarcerating them in labour camps.
Last week, March 21, Chinese Minister for Public Security Zhou Yongkang announced that the authorities would "strike hard at hostile forces both in and outside the nation". According to the ABC, who reported the announcement, hostile forces are considered to be anyone with a spiritual practice outside state control or anyone supporting any form of autonomy for Taiwan, Xinjiang or Tibet.
In August last year an international coalition of human rights organisations, including Reporters Without Borders and Olympic Watch, issued a joint statement saying the IOC had failed to protect Olympic ideals and the Chinese Communist regime had not only continued its human rights violations unabated, but was using the 2008 Olympics as propaganda to further its own ends. The group called on national Olympic committees, athletes and sponsors to take action.
Amnesty International followed up with a report in September calling on China to address key areas of human rights concerns, including media freedom, human rights activists and justice.
Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK, said Beijing's promises to improve human rights, made when it was bidding for the Olympics, have not been honoured.
"Thousands of people are executed every year after unfair trials; people are tortured in prisons and thrown in jail just for peacefully standing up for human rights. And the authorities continue to harass and imprison journalists and Internet users – hardly the 'complete media freedom' that the Government has spoken of," Ms Allen said.
"Unless basic human rights are urgently improved, China's gleaming Olympic stadiums will hide a brutal reality of injustice, execution, torture and repression," she said.
The Amnesty report was forwarded to the IOC who had said they would act on any information provided by the internationally respected organisation, but to date there appears to have been little response.
A letter drafted by former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas, co-authors of a report on illegal organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China, has also been forwarded to the IOC and has met with a similar lack of consideration.
In their letter, the two authors request that the IOC consider its own charter, asking how the committee is "safeguarding the dignity of the individual" and encouraging "the establishment of a peaceful society" in China when it ignores the Communist regime's daily human rights violations.
The letter, sent to IOC president Jacques Rogges and most major international IOC offices, including Australia's, also asks how the Olympics Committee will respond when "athletes, coaches, officials and the general public become informed of the atrocities".
To date, replies have apparently constituted a format response, which notes "concerns", but reiterates that the mission is "to develop, promote and protect the Olympic movement".
While many Olympics supporters say that human rights are political and therefore of no concern to Olympic committees, Australian Labor MP and now Opposition Assistant Treasurer Chris Bowen says human rights can be political, but only to the extent that "politics can be used to progress human rights for all".
A strong and consistent advocate of human rights, Mr Bowen stopped short of calling for a boycott of the 2008 Games, but said that the Beijing Olympics provided "a chance to focus on China's human rights record and the problems encountered by followers of Falun Gong".
Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett, who has expressed concern about Beijing's human rights violations on a number of occasions, said he was not calling for a boycott of the Olympics, but warned that it had "potential for it to get to that stage".
Speaking in the Australian Parliament late last year, Senator Bartlett said: "These are very serious human rights abuses in China, not just with regard to the organ-harvesting allegations, and I do not think we can rightly put them to one side because they are uncomfortable or difficult diplomatically.
"We need to look for ways to try to get more effective action to get improvements in this area." Senator Bartlett said.
Feeds