Human Rights Abuses Abroad: Why International Sports Organizations Cannot Stand on the Sidelines
Statue of Tommie Smith—the gold medalist in the 200-meter sprint for the 1968 Summer Olympics—as he raises a fist in protest for the American Civil Rights Movement. Photo by Russ Morris.
Every year, countless human rights abuses committed by governments against their own people are swept under the rug by international organizations hoping to stay in good standing with these abusive nations and to allow further hosting. Police violence, human rights abuses, and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of coaches towards the athletes they are entrusted with seem to be recurring themes in the international community. Many of the organizations, such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC), play a key role in connecting countries through sport.
Organizations—such as the aforementioned IOC and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)—have a spotty history of recognizing human rights abuses, even when doing so might be an explicitly stated mission in their charter. The charter of the IOC, for example, highlights the Committee’s continual goal to promote respect for international human rights conventions insofar as they apply to the Olympic Games and those which especially ensure a “respect for human dignity; rejection of discrimination of any kind on whatever grounds, be it race, color, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and rejection of “[and] all forms of harassment and abuse.” Setting a moderately-clear standard for how the IOC will handle human rights, charters such as this raise a strong question: As a fixture of international interaction, what is the role—or responsibility—of sports organizations to respond to human rights abuses?
Should Sports Organizations Promote Human Rights?
While it’s fine to say that the IOC and other bodies should advocate for human rights, it becomes difficult to create a clear decision simply due to the divisive, political nature that human rights hold in our world. In a world filled with many different views, religions, and experiences, some nations back away from the largely Western notion of human rights, a view grounded in the existence of “inalienable, innate rights that are awarded to all individual human beings.” With this concept focusing on defining human rights as rights belonging to individuals instead of groups of people, such as viewing that the right to speech applies to all individuals rather than a single group, many nations may choose to oppose their implementation as they may conflict with religious, cultural, or government interests/values.
Yet sport, by its nature, stands as something more than just entertainment. It stands as the pinnacle platform to showcase the limits of humanity’s abilities. Events such as the Olympics showcase the most talented athletes from across the globe, bringing a multitude of nations and billions of people together to celebrate and honor the struggle experienced by athletes to reach perfection. In this sense, the top athletes of the world are meant to serve as role models to the rest of society, standing atop podiums and demonstrating the importance of striving for the pinnacle of their sport and accomplishing that which was previously deemed impossible.
If sports organizations aim to uphold equality amongst competitors as a primary principle, they must also abide by this logic outside of the arena. Competition can only retain its value when no athlete—regardless of their nationality, religion, skin color, gender, sexuality, or heritage—is given a leg-up above another competitor. Every athlete that steps onto the track, court, field, or strip must all inherently be equal in the rules of sport and their capacity to succeed. Therefore, we cannot separate our value for equal sporting competition from global human rights without losing the principal reason sports are cherished in the first place. Ultimately, sports and human rights are linked hand-in-hand, giving athletes and the organizations that support them the duty to advocate for a world that mirrors athletic competition; one in which equal treatment among all individuals is ensured.
Handling Crises
Having demonstrated that international sports organizations and athletes are obligated to promote human rights, it is now possible to consider the extent to which they have already done so. The IOC, one of the most influential bodies in sports, stands as the largest platform for international unification and inclusion for athletic achievement. Of the 206 internationally recognized “Olympic Nations,” the most recent Olympic Games—held in Beijing, China—included competitors from 90 of these different nations.
While a large showing of countries exemplifies the strong diversity within the Olympics, these Games were plagued with controversy over the IOC’s handling of Chinese human rights abuses. This is not anything new to Chinese Olympic hosting. In 2008, the Summer Olympics—hosted in Beijing—were touted as being “a force for good” but were instead rife with journalist arrests and migrant labor abuses. After failing to punish these abuses back in 2008, the IOC awarded the right to host this year’s Winter Olympics to China even as the nation continues to unjustly arrest journalists, women’s rights activists, lawyers, Hong Kong dissidents, and commit crimes against humanity—including possible genocide—against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang province. Having issued no statements on these issues and failing to denounce China for its actions, the IOC stood by the sidelines, letting a nation host one of the most important sports events in the world while also committing horrific abuses. This stands in stark contrast to the IOC’s commitment to human rights as it supposedly aims to improve, “the promotion and respect of human rights within the scope of its responsibility.”
The IOC, however, is not the only player on the international stage. FIFA, for example—the world association for soccer—states that the organization, “[respects] all internationally recognized human rights and [strives] to promote the protection of these rights,” but how does this hold up in practice? One needs to look no further than the upcoming 2022 FIFA World Cup set to be hosted in Qatar, a nation with a continued history of human rights abuses. Most notably, Qatar struggles to uphold the rights of migrant workers, most of whom aren’t allowed to leave the nation without their employer’s permission, aren’t protected by the nation’s labor laws, do not have the freedom to change employment, are prohibited from engaging in labor unions, and face delays or heightened obstacles when seeking justice. On top of this, journalists sent to investigate these issues are arrested, a clear violation of international custom. Even with these flagrant violations of human rights and international custom, FIFA has refused to do anything to address these issues. There have been no formal statements, no review, no sanctions, and not an inkling of change in FIFA’s handling of the situation.
Fortunately, there are instances where sports organizations have taken meaningful steps to combat human rights abuses. Currently, Russia (with the aid of Belarus) is engaged in a war with Ukraine, a conflict that involves horrendous human rights abuses and violations of jus in bello and jus ad bellum (the internationally recognized laws of war and laws by which war is acceptable) by the Russians through the unjustified targeting of civilians with non-discriminatory armaments such as cluster munitions. Given these atrocious abuses, the IOC Executive Board recommended on February 28, 2022, that International Sports Federations and event organizers not invite Russian or Belarusian athletes to competitions. FIFA has taken this a step further, choosing to indefinitely ban Russia-representing men’s and women’s teams from participating in competitions, including this year’s upcoming 2022 Qatar World Cup. With these recent responses to Russia’s transgressions, it has been shown that sports organizations are not doomed to stand by as governments abuse their populations. Rather, sports organizations have the ability to punish offending nations, sending a strong message to the transgressors and other nations that such practices will not be tolerated.
What Can Be Done to Improve
Given that sports organizations have areas to improve regarding their human rights track record, they must make credible efforts to reinforce any and all commitments to uphold human rights and the principles of sport within an organization’s framework. This can be done through statements or—preferably—through the implementation of amendments to an organization’s charter. With its dedication to human rights enumerated in its founding documents, sports organizations can show their willingness to be held accountable across the board with these added clauses.
Yet with this dedication to human rights, it is important to specify exactly what human rights treaties or documents will be upheld. For example, the IOC may declare that it will dedicate itself to promoting the spread of ideas enumerated within the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a non-binding resolution by the UN General Assembly enshrining the rights and freedoms that all humans are entitled to. On the other hand, they could choose to uphold specific articles within treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) or the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). This second route would allow sports bodies to be incredibly specific in their goals and grant them the ability to try to retain a certain amount of political neutrality by cherry-picking the provisions they uphold. This neutrality is good as organizations are able to maintain a sense of international cooperation and camaraderie; but at the same time, omitting some rights from the scope of an organization’s mission leaves holes in which rights are deemed “important enough” to protect.
In order to enforce these commitments, sports organizations can fund the creation and maintenance of departments centered around monitoring, reporting, interviewing, and creating punishments for nations found to be abusing human rights. In a report created by former UN Human Rights Chief Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein and Rachel Davis—the Vice President of Shift, a center of expertise regarding UN Human Rights Guiding Principles dedicated to drafting and reshaping strategies for governments and organizations—the two highlight that one of the most efficient ways to promote human rights by sports organizations would be the creation a body in charge of drafting and executing human rights policies with the help of human rights specialists. These individuals can present the head of an organization’s human rights department with reports from UN treaty bodies in charge of collecting data and reports on a nation’s human rights record, as well as information from outside sources such as NGOs, allowing sports organizations to act as protectors—not investigators—of human rights abroad.
This three-step model of reconstruction will greatly improve human rights protection across the globe as it strikes a balance between international and domestic pressures. By establishing sports organizations not as the investigators of human rights abuses, but simply as an outside party limiting a country’s ability to peacefully converse on the international stage, countries, and organizations pressure a nation to change its policies in order to once again engage in high-grossing economic and cultural events such as the Olympics. This limitation, at the same time, may result in citizens rallying to change their nation’s oppressive policies due to the large role sports play in a nation’s view of itself. With this in mind, the internal and external pressures applied to a nation from their own citizens and international sports organizations may just be enough to eliminate—or at least reduce—oppressive legislation and practices.