The British House of Commons has called for a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics. The event should not take place in a country whose government is credibly accused of human rights violations, says the decision adopted on Thursday.
Therefore, the government should refuse invitations to attend the Games as long as Beijing does not stop the “atrocities” against the Muslim minority of Uighurs in the north-west Chinese province of Xinjiang. The decision of the parliamentary chamber, which received cross-party support, is not binding on the government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Conservative MP and former Minister Iain Duncan Smith warned against a repeat of Britain’s pre-World War II appeasement policy. “We forgot what happened when we appeased another terrible dictatorship,” he said. “60 Million people died as a result of our failure to appease them, and we are on the same path today.«
His party colleague Tim Loughton pointed out that previous attempts to engage China had failed. The 2008 Winter Olympics in Beijing were announced by the International Olympic Committee as a catalyst for human rights reforms in China. “A widely recognized genocide in Xinjiang later, thousands of Tibetans arrested, imprisoned, displaced, tortured and killed later, in the face of the eradication of freedom of speech and political freedoms in Hong Kong (…) can you say that went well, right?Loughton said.
