Antonio Guterres said his decision to attend the games has ‘nothing to do’ with Chinese-government policies.
Antonio Guterres said his decision to attend the games has ‘nothing to do’ with Chinese-government policies.
U .N. secretary-general Antonio Guterres doubled down Friday on his decision to accept an invite to the Beijing Olympics, amid boycotts by several governments over the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide of Uyghurs. He also said his decision to attend has “nothing to do” with his opinions of Chinese government policies.
“Let’s be clear — this visit to the Olympics is not a political visit,” said Guterres, in response to a question from National Review during a press conference. “This visit is a visit that comes out of an invitation by the International Olympic Committee and corresponds to what has been a very solid partnership between the U.N. and the International Olympic Committee.”
Newly elected to a second five-year term, Guterres was laying out his 2022 priorities for the U.N. during his annual press briefing. He spoke about his plan to attend the Olympics after NR asked if he would raise the party’s crimes against humanity targeting ethnic minorities in Xinjiang during his trip to Beijing, and if he assessed that the Chinese government is carrying out such acts. He did not directly answer those questions.
Guterres had said in December that he would attend the Olympics. The White House, meanwhile, announced last month that U.S. diplomats would boycott the Beijing Olympics “given the PRC’s ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.” Several other democracies have also announced diplomatic boycotts of the games.
Guterres said in March that the U.N. is negotiating with Chinese officials to organize an unfettered investigative trip to the region. But the U.N.’s top human-rights official, Michelle Bachelet, said in September that she has not been able to negotiate “meaningful access” to Xinjiang and that she is releasing a report on the situation soon.
The Olympic Games are a symbol of unity, mutual respect, and cooperation “of peoples of different cultures, of different religions, of different ethnicities,” Guterres said on Friday. “This is more important than ever when we see xenophobia, when we see racism, when we see white supremacy, when we see antisemitism, when we see anti-Muslim hatred proliferating all over the world.”
He also said that his support of the “Olympic ideal” is why he is going to the games, “and it has nothing to do with my opinions about different policies that take place in the People’s Republic of China.”
The U.S. State Department, numerous parliamentary bodies, and independent experts on mass-atrocity crimes have found that Beijing is perpetrating crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang. Over the past five years, a drumbeat of media reports and witness testimonies have revealed the existence of a modern police state in the far-west region, where Uyghurs and others are arbitrarily detained in prison camps, subjected to forced labor and torture, and forced to undergo sterilizations.
Last week, a coalition of 250 advocacy organizations representing Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, and Taiwanese, among others, wrote to Guterres, asking him to boycott the Olympics over those abuses and others carried out by Beijing.
“Your participation would undermine the United Nations’ efforts to hold China accountable and go against the core principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the human-rights advocates wrote.
Guterres’s invitation by the International Olympic Committee is customary, but it comes at a sensitive time, when U.S. lawmakers of both parties have taken aim at the committee for providing political cover for the Chinese government’s policies. Earlier this week, Representatives Michael Waltz, a Republican, and Jennifer Wexton, a Democrat, introduced a bill that would strip the IOC of its tax-exempt status in the United States. Republican representative Mike Gallagher also introduced legislation that would place human-rights sanctions on IOC officials deemed to be complicit in promoting Beijing’s narrative around its detention of tennis star Peng Shuai.