"Showcase Human Rights at the Beijing Olympics" Petition Form

Call to the Chinese Government: "Showcase Human Rights at the Beijing Olympics" 

Now that the Beijing Olympics are about to begin, it is apparent that all the promises China made to improve human rights before the Olympics were nothing but empty rhetoric. Ample evidence exists of the human rights abuses still being committed today by the Chinese government domestically, as well as its continuing support for human rights violators around the world.

The Olympic Games are an important event for all humanity, because of the Olympic ideals of peace and friendship. Unfortunately, in the last days before the opening of the Games in Beijing, many human rights organizations have reported that human rights conditions in China have only deteriorated. When the Games were awarded, the Chinese government pledged to the international community to improve these conditions; this pledge has already been broken. The global propaganda campaign for the Beijing Games, based on the slogan "one world, one dream," is a cruel irony for all the victims of the Chinese government's actions.

China's Record of Suppressing Human Rights

• Suppression of Freedom of Speech: the Chinese government continues to completely control internet usage, blocking all politically sensitive websites. Human rights activists in China are regularly subject to house arrest, police surveillance, and harassment.

• Judicial Rights are nowhere to be seen: dissidents are secretly arrested and stripped of their rights to legal representation, to medical care, and for their relatives to attend their judicial proceedings. Moreover, China carries out by far the highest number of executions of any country in the world.

• Beijing Olympics workers have no Labor Rights: workers constructing the "bird nest" stadium and other urban development projects related to the Beijing Olympics have been exploited. Millions of workers are faced with the problems of occupational hazards, death, and overwork, but have no medical insurance, fair wages, or decent work environments.

• A country with one of the lowest rankings in Freedom of the Press: China remains the country with the highest number of detained journalists. Even after winning the right to host the Olympics in 2001, China has continued to detain many journalists under vague charges related to "national security."

• Suppression of Religious Freedom: Falun Gong practitioners have been oppressed and beaten, Christian churches have been forcibly closed, and religious websites have been shut down.

• State Violation of Freedom of Movement and Residence: In preparation for the Olympics, the authorities have confiscated land and forcibly evicted many Beijing residents from their homes, especially in traditional neighborhoods.

• The "Genocide Olympics" - China's Complicity in Darfur and Crimes in Tibet. China is the primary supporter of the government in Sudan, which is perpetrating the genocide in Darfur, in which over 300,000 Darfuris have died; in order to protect its oil interests in Sudan, China supplies 80% of the weapons for the Sudanese military, and has used its veto power in the United Nations to block international action to bring peace to the region. In its occupation of Tibet, China has stripped away the political, religious, and cultural and educational rights of the Tibetan people for decades, and this March carried out a further bloody and violent suppression.

• Steadfast Ally of Notorious Dictatorships: Burma is the most ruthless regime in Southeast Asia, and China along with Russia is its primary arms supplier. In 2007, China used its United Nations veto power to stop the Security Council from condemning the Burmese military regimes crackdown on the peaceful demonstrations of monks and ordinary citizens.

        The True Olympic Spirit Respects Human Rights

Finally, we call on all sectors, government agencies, and athletes in Taiwan to support our demand that the Chinese government, as the host of this year's Olympics, must shoulder its important responsibility to uphold the Olympic spirit and stop evading the world's attention on its human rights problems. We make the following two basic demands:

• We call on the Chinese government to immediately halt its suppression of Chinese citizens' basic human rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and freedom of the press, and to protect basic labor rights, gender rights, environmental rights and ethnic diversity.

• We call on the Chinese government to show concern for international human rights issues, and to promise it will not wield its veto power on the United Nations as a political tool to obstruct the international community's efforts to support human rights. 

This petition is launched by: Taiwan Free Burma Network, Taiwan Labor Front, Taiwan Friends of Tibet, Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty, Taiwan Guts, Taiwan Youth for Democracy in Asia

 "Showcase Human Rights at the Beijing Olympics" Petition Form

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