Bennett Freeman
Hi, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to all of you, wherever you may be around the world today. I’m Bennett Freeman, an Associate Fellow with Chatham House, and I’m delighted to welcome you to this very timely webinar on International Relations and Sports. I’m going to just begin by making a couple of housekeeping comments. First to say that this event will be held on the record and recorded, and that attendees are encouraged to submit questions throughout the event using the Q&A function that you’ve got, and we’re going to be proceeding in three segments here, following a very brief introduction from me.
We’re going to first be going to our three distinguished panellists, and then we’ll be going to a second segment of a quick discussion amongst the four of us, and picking up on comments that the three panellists will have made in their initial opening remarks. And then, last and not least, we’ll be turning to the audience for not only your questions but, we hope, for your comments, and I’ll repeat the encouragement as we’ve – to register comments and questions in the ‘chat’, when we make the transition to that third and final segment of our hour-long programme.
So, I just want to begin by making the obvious observation that this event couldn’t possibly be more timely. Not only are we convening, what, five or six days now into the Beijing Winter Olympics, but we’re also in the second month of a year with two mega sporting events. First beginning with the Beijing Olympics, convened by the International Olympic Committee, hosted by the City of Beijing, the Government of China, but looking to the end of the year, beginning in late November, when the FIFA World Cup will be taking place in Qatar, hosted by the Government of Qatar, working closely, of course, with FIFA and its various constituents.
So, this is truly a mega-year for mega sporting events, and we’re so fortunate to have three distinguished panellists, all of whom are deeply involved in – with Mary Harvey and with Minky Worden, in both of the events, both the Beijing Winter Olympics and the World Cup, but with Jonas Baer-Hoffman, really with the FIFA World Cup, but no doubt watching closely what’s happening in Beijing for the implications for his event later on in the year.
Another obvious observation to make is that sports and human rights and politics and, for that matter, geopolitics is hardly a new subject. It’s got a history going back nearly a century, but it’s also a fair observation to note that this year is turbo-charged for sports and geopolitics, and indeed human rights, with very clear issues not only playing out with – in connection with the Beijing Winter Olympics, but also emerging and brewing for later in the year with FIFA and the World Cup.
So, we’ll get a flavour in the discussion here of some of the geopolitical dimensions, but what we’re really going to focus on are what are the responsibilities of the different actors, the host country governments, the sporting federations themselves, both the International Olympic Committee and FIFA, the corporate sponsors of both, and there’s some significant overlap between the two, the athletes themselves, who of course are front and centre. These are great international competitive sporting events, and athletes though, as we’re going to hear particularly from Jonas, are there as competitors, but are also there as union members, at least for FIFA, and also as citizens.
And then, of course, global civil society and, and human rights activists, who have their own perspectives, and we’re going to hear that especially explicitly from Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch. So, with that, I do want to introduce really very quickly the three speakers, and I’ll introduce them in the order in which they’ll make their five minutes or so of opening remarks. We’re going to go first to Minky Worden, who is Director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch, and I’ve known Minky for some years and have had the pleasure of working closely with her on the Beijing Olympics in recent weeks, recent months. And she’s going to give a perspective, obviously, on behalf of Human Rights Watch, but also [audio cuts out – 06:45].
Minky Worden
I think we may have lost Bennett at the tail end of his introduction of me, and Tom and Chatham House Friends, with your permission, I’ll go ahead and get underway. He was almost finished introducing me.
Tom Chappell
Sure, sorry about this, everyone. Yeah, we appear to have lost Bennett. Yeah, if, Minky, you could commence your opening remarks, that would be fantastic. We’ll see if we can get Bennett back in the meantime.
Minky Worden
I’d be delighted to. Thanks very much. Looks like we lost him, yes. So, hello, everyone. I’m going to follow Bennet’s instructions, and to say first a few words about the work of Human Rights Watch. We are a global human rights organisation, monitoring human rights abuses in more than 100 countries worldwide, and just to be clear, all countries commit human rights abuses.
We have a business and human rights team, and we often report on the responsibilities of businesses and enterprises to use their leverage to respect and protect human rights. Welcome back, Bennett.
Bennett Freeman
Thank you.
Minky Worden
I know you were at the end of introducing me.
Bennett Freeman
No, I was just at the end, I was just going to introduce – I was just talking about Jonas. I was just going to introduce Mary Harvey as the Chief Executive of the Center for Sports and Human Rights, and I’m happy to see Mary as well, and go bears. We’re both from Cal Berklee and Mary, of course, is a great Olympian herself, athlete herself. So, on to you, Minky.
Minky Worden
Yes. I might also mention that Mary was the, was the goalkeeper for the team, the US women’s national team for the very first Women’s World Cup, so it’s amazing, her background as an athlete and a leader. So, first of all, on sport and human rights, so, Human Rights Watch, broadly speaking, does human rights work and monitoring around the world. But on sport and human rights, we’ve played, I think, an important role documenting human rights abuses in host countries, but also caused by these mega sporting events. And those abuses are forced evictions, migrant labour abuses, crushing of civil society, repression of Journalists trying to report the Games, and of course discrimination against women and LGBT people, alongside a series of reports we’ve done on sexual abuse of athletes in sport who don’t have the opportunity to report these abuses.
So, and just for context, Human Rights Watch’s first report on human rights in an Olympic host country was for the Atlanta Games in 1996. So, we also regularly engage with sport governing bodies like FIFA and the IOC to encourage them to adopt human rights policies, and to remediate serious human rights abuses. Human Rights Watch has been urging FIFA and the IOC to adopt human rights across their operations since well before the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
A little bit of perspective: in 2019 the then Ski Federation President, Giofranco – Gian Franco Kasper, gave an interview where he claimed that the Olympics are “Easier in dictatorships,” and the honorary IOC member was referring to the 2022 Winter Olympics in China. He said, “Dictators can organise events such as this without asking the people’s permission.” He later walked back these comments under pressure, but he had already said out loud what many sport federation leaders think in private.
With the Winter Olympics opening ceremony last Friday and the FIFA World Cup kicking off in November in Qatar, two of the world’s biggest sporting events are being hosted by serious human rights abusers. As Bennett alluded to, you could call 2022 an annus horribilis for sport. The Olympics and the World Cup each have an audited audience of more than three billion people worldwide. That’s almost half the global population, and this large sport-loving audience is why China and Qatar want so badly to refashion their image as a glamorous sporting host in good standing with the world. They also use these games to sports wash their abysmal human rights record.
For an autocracy like China, the Olympics are not just about sport. They are a geopolitical event that can elevate the status of the government and the ruling Chinese Communist Party at home and abroad. Contrary to IOC President, Thomas Bach’s claim that the Olympics are “Not political,” Chinese rulers have been using these Games to assert their right to mass incarceration in Xinjiang, to repression in Hong Kong and Tibet, and to repress the rights of their own population. And just a reminder, the first people to suffer from China’s human rights abuses are always Chinese citizens.
For the last 30 years, Human Rights Watch has reported on China’s deepening repression, including in the aftermath of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. It’s important to note that, because at the time the IOC and the Chinese organisers said that the Olympics in China in 2008 would improve human rights. Instead, in 2021 Human Rights Watch published a report on the Chinese Government’s crimes against humanity. These are among the worst crimes in the human rights lexicon.
These crimes were in the Xinjiang region of China. We documented mass arbitrary detention, torture, surveillance, separation of Uyghur families, forced labour and sexual violence. More than a million Turkic Muslims and Uyghurs have been sent to so-called re-education camps. Their families feel they have simply disappeared. They may be victims of forced labour in China’s untransparent supply chains.
The Beijing Games also lack protection for Journalists and Athletes who entered into a hazardous working climate due to Chinese Government repression. Athletes have been directly threatened not to speak up about human rights in China by government officials, and told effectively to shut up and ski. The case of three-time Chinese Olympian and tennis player Peng Shuai focused the world’s attention on the conflict between the rights of athletes and powerful government and sport leaders. Chinese authorities sent, silenced the tennis star after she accused a former top official of sexual abuse. In response, the Women’s Tennis Association called off its tournaments in China, a response I hope that we can return to in the discussion. In contrast, the IOC officials are effectively collaborating with Beijing’s cover-up.
It is very hard to report on what is happening in China. Chinese officials are blocking not just a UN-backed investigation into human rights violations, but they’re also blocking supply chain Auditors, and the Journalists the world relies on to reveal abuses or health risks, such as the pandemic in Wuhan. To address these abuses, Human Rights Watch has been urging the IOC to adopt human rights across its operations, since well before the last Beijing Olympics in 2008.
China’s Olympics are not the only mega sporting event to be held in a dictatorship in 2022. In November, Qatar will host the World Cup, the most watched sporting event in the world, in stadiums where workers have died utterly preventable deaths. Human Rights Watch has documented that the infrastructure for World Cup events has been built via the abusive kafala labour sponsorship system, it has not been eradicated, and in some cases labour practices may amount to modern slavery.
Qatar is the world’s richest per capita nation, but two million migrant workers have little power to bring complaints or escape abuse when employers control their exit from the country, residency and ability to change jobs. Many employers exploit this control by confiscating workers’ passports, forcing them to work excessive hours and denying them wages. We should be especially concerned as the preparations for the World Cup are concluded in coming months.
Starting in 2011, Human Rights Watch has published a series of reports on worker rights abuses and worker deaths from heat, building the 2022 World Cup. Reporting on abuses is very hard in Qatar, because it is a country that does not have press freedom. LGBTQ rights do not exist, and Qatar has a Saudi-Arabia-like male guardianship system that severely curtails basic rights for women and girls.
Around the world, athletes and national team members are increasingly protesting Qatar’s hosting. Football players are wearing shirts that spell out “Human Rights,” and some players are saying they don’t want to play in stadiums that workers died to build. FIFA adopted the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in 2016, and a Human Rights policy in 2018, following a thermonuclear crisis that saw half its leadership arrested for corruption.
FIFA has played an important role in some reforms to project workers in Qatar, but it’s also unwilling to confront its partner, the government, when reforms are not implemented. That refusal to confront your government partner when there are human rights abuses is at the heart of this year’s perfect storm for sports. As Bennett said, the year is bookended by the world’s two biggest sporting events, hosted by human rights abusers. This is a wake-up call for sports. The symbiotic relationship between sports bodies and dictatorship is under pressure like never before.
As you will hear from Jonas and Mary, fans, players, sponsors and the human rights community are increasingly asking tough questions about why the global sports leaders, who claim sport is a force for good, are not addressing serious abuses by their partners.
Finally, companies who sponsor the World Cup and the Olympics are on the hotseat for host country abuses around the Games they are underwriting. In some cases, forced labour and supply chains especially, the companies may be implicated in abuses, and will have to account for their own due diligence around these Games.
I look for – in sum, this perfect storm of major sporting events is forcing an overdue reckoning for powerful sports bodies that for years have side-lined their commitments to human rights. Thanks very much.
Bennett Freeman
Minky, thank you so much for your incisive, and indeed challenging opening remarks. Over to Jonas.
Jonas Baer-Hoffman
Thank you, Bennett, and nice to – nice of you to have us in this panel debate. I mean, it’s obviously, like you said, it’s timely, but frankly, for the work we’re doing it’s always timely, because from the perspective of our members, who are professional footballers, who are organised in unions in approximately 70 countries around the world, human rights questions are not just matters of mega sporting events, where they of course become most visible and most pertinent for the general public, but they concern them in their day-to-day lives as workers, as citizens, as you stated in your opening, every day.
We’re effectively the global umbrella organisation of domestic trade unions that represent professional footballers. We co-operate with unions in other sports in the United States, and rugby and cricket around the world, to effectively enshrine labour rights, human rights, economic rights of athletes at the core of sport governance.
I don’t have quite as an, elaborate opening remark as Minky just gave you, but I wanted to touch on a few points to maybe set up our perspective on this. And I think when we speak about sport in this context, it’s quite important that we are precise in what we mean, because sport oftentimes is confused and convoluted between the activity of playing sport, and its value in society, the organisations running sports, and the individuals, oftentimes athletes, coaches, referees, etc., actually participating in sports. And there’s a risk that if we convolute this then oftentimes, the values, the positive values of sports are attributed to organisations that don’t really deserve that, but also the criticism is attributed to people who don’t really deserve that. So, it’s quite important that we make that distinction, and I think the core, obviously, of this discussion is about sport organisations, more than anything else.
Like you said in your opening, sport has always been and will always be political, and I would even go further back than 100 years. You can, you can see there’s historic documents that athletes in old Greek history were organised in guilds and syndicates. So clearly there was already back then a form of involvement of these people in these societies and how they engaged with the people. And the claim that sports would not be political, I think, has two causes and two consequences. The one is that it’s obviously a defence strategy from accountability, and the second is that there is an attempt to make considerations of human rights a consideration of politics, which is deeply problematic, and which is what we’re seeing these lines being drawn across.
Obviously, sport is faced, and all sport organisations are faced with a shift that all of us are experiencing in society, where we have greater societal debate about human rights, where questions of equality, questions of non-discrimination in all areas of our livelihoods are becoming more central to how we appreciate living a fulfilled life, and sport is no different. And the challenge that that presents to most sport organisations, that the historic policy of neutrality around these questions simply does not hold true any longer. It’s not a position that is possible to maintain, and the best example maybe was during last year’s European Championships, where there was the conflict about illuminating stadia in the rainbow colours, whereby it became very clear that, yes, making that statement is a statement of a view of how the world should be, but not making it is likewise a statement. So, the position of a sport organisation to say, we will just not engage this question, is not one of neutrality, but it transports a message that is deeply political, and therefore these organisations fear internal conflicts that obviously exist. But that is why it’s so critical that we draw this line of apolitical consideration around the framework of human rights, the UN GPs and all the things that Minky talked about.
Quickly on the appreciation from the athlete’s perspective. Our members are obviously all professional athletes, so they stand in context to all of this maybe in three dimensions: one, as athletes. Everything that we’re talking about is their sport, and everything that is being done around these events is done in their name, because they are the ones who ultimately step on the field, the court, the track, and produce the product that is being sold, and very successfully, to billions of consumers around the world, yet they have no say in these questions.
Not a player chose where the World Cup would be played and not an athlete chose where the Olympic Games would be taking place. Yet, they are confronted with the public criticism, and they’re asked to justify their choices to participate in these events, and of course everything that it does to their sport. And that’s why players of our membership, many of them deeply care about what is happening in Qatar, and how the migrant workers are being treated, and whether the laws that have been changed are actually being applied. And unfortunately, in many scenarios, they’re not, which leaves us with sustained problems only a few months before the tournament is meant to kick off. We’re co-operating with organisations like the BWI, with Amnesty International, with Human Rights Watch and others, to drive change on behalf of the players in these communities, but it is very, very difficult work.
The second dimension of the athlete’s perspective on this is that of a worker. They themselves are workers, and I know most people maybe have a glorified view of what it means to be a professional football player. But the vast majority of people we represent are workers, in the appreciation that we would look at across society, fragile contracts, difficult working conditions, oftentimes not receiving their wages, limited access to arbitration, in terms of their labour disputes that they may be facing, etc. All of these come down to human rights questions in the broader sense, but it also concerns their collective rights, their ability to collectively bargain their conditions, which is, in the sports governance system in most parts, still very suppressed. And in football, to be fair, we’re many steps further along due to the work of unions, due to some very important litigation history, to actually enforce those rights. In other sports it’s far worse, especially individual sports.
And then the last perspective, of course, is that of merely being citizens of communities in which they live, and I think we’ve all witnessed, over the last few years, that it’s athletes these days who are actually leading the moral debate about how sports impact societies. It’s unfortunately not the institutions that state they would. It is athletes who speak out about discrimination, about racism, about inequalities, about human rights, and they deeply care, and it is their leadership that actually maybe makes sports what it can be in society.
So, in conclusion, I think there is a risk and there is an opportunity here. The risk is that unless sports organisations start to truly embrace it, not just in the letter of their constitutions, but in their actions, their engagement and true commitment to human rights, there’s a risk of a disconnect from the values that drive society, and sport can only exist in the context of the society in which it takes place. So, that disconnect is a massive risk that is underappreciated today. The opportunity is that in embracing them, sport organisations have a chance to actually deliver upon the values that they’ve written into their charters and in their statutes for the hundreds of years that you’re talking about. There’s a real opportunity to be the force for good that, like I said in the beginning, oftentimes the individuals who make up sports and the activity of sports are in the little communities where we all witness it. So, that’s the upside, but it requires a true commitment and a honest decision and a genuine process to embracing human rights across everything that they do. I’ll leave it there, and I look forward to discussing all this further.
Bennett Freeman
Jonas, thank you so much. Let’s return in the discussion in a few minutes to this risk and opportunity theme and pose later the question of, even as these events playout at the beginning and end of the year with the Beijing Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, what are the implications and lessons for the future that we can draw from them, even as we’re working on them in real time?
And so, now, over to you, Mary.
Mary Harvey
Well, thanks, Bennett, and it’s, you know, it’s been a nice arc here. We’ve started with Minky outlining some of the challenges, right, and human rights concerns, and then to Jonas to talk about what it’s like, right, for athletes to be, you know, as athletes, as workers and as citizens, to be in this position. And so, it begs the question, well, what are we going to do about it, what’s next?
So, I want to talk a little bit about the Center for Sport and Human Rights, which is an organisation that’s pretty complicated, but is absolutely the what – has a critical role to play in the ‘what next’? So, I’d like to spend a little bit of time introducing the Center, and then addressing some of the comments that have been made.
So, for those of you who don’t know us, the Center for Sport and Human Rights is a human rights organisation for the world of sport. So, our mission is to advance a world of sport that fully respects and promotes human rights and labour standards by doing three things: generating awareness, building capacity and delivering impact. So, in practice, that means we’re focused on raising standards and on improving processes, and you’ve heard some things mentioned before about the importance of process. We’ll get into that in a minute. So, we’re now an independent organisation, but we came about as the result of a multistakeholder process, and we continue to have that focus on being a safe place for courageous conversation and collective action. So, that means we work with everyone, including Human Rights Watch and FIFPRO, among many others. So, we work with sport organisations, mega sporting event organisers, like those who put on mega events like the FIFA World Cup, the Euros and others, corporate sponsors, civil society organisations, trade unions, governments, UN agencies, so, all actors in the ecosystem of sport, in the sport ecosystem.
And we do that to advance respect for human rights at every level, so, the sport and human rights movement has grown substantially in recent years. So, just – I mean, what we’re seeing now, the news coverage of cases, not just with, with mega sporting events, but athlete abuse, and where people, athletes, workers, officials, volunteers and others, are protected by sport or sporting events. So, all of these are challenges for sport to respond to as it seeks to maintain a social licence and demonstrate that the sector as a whole can be responsible, and this is where it gets into what Jonas says about delivering on the values that sport provides, and it can do that, but only if it doesn’t cause harm and it’s safe.
So, mega sporting events like the Olympic Games and the World Cup certainly encapsulate a lot of the human rights issues present in sport, and we see this in every stage of the event, from bidding all the way through to post-event legacy. Human rights risks associated with these are – activities aren’t unique to sport, but we believe that sport should set the example and major events should catalyse good practice. How does the life of the average person get better by hosting or participating in a mega sporting event? So, at least the very world of sport should keep pace with broader human rights developments that apply to non-state actors, which includes acknowledging and implementing human rights responsibilities in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, or the UNGPs, as they’re commonly known.
So, the UNGPs provide a roadmap, starting with human rights due diligence, and we should acknowledge that there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done to align the world of sport at every level with the fundamental principles of human dignity, human rights and labour rights. And it’s a major global industry, so, like every other sector, all involved have responsibilities within it, so within the entire ecosystem, to respect human rights. So, our aim at the Center is to support all actors in sport, the entire ecosystem, to help them take practical steps to align their policies and practices with international human rights standards, and we expressed that through our own Sporting Chance Principles, which, if you go to our website, you can see what those are. So, in co-operation with our multistakeholder coalition, we worked to identify actionable steps that key actors can take to better respect and protect human rights, while bringing diverse voices, in a safe space, to work together to create constructive dialogue and collective action. That’s about who we are and how we work.
When it comes to Beijing 2022, Olympic and Paralympic Games, as Minky has noted, these Games have raised a number of difficult questions. There’s safety, widely reported human rights violations, particular concern on the treatment of the Uyghur population, freedom of expression, press freedom, and so on. And it’s important that civil society organisations and others continue to fulfil their role in the ecosystem by calling out human rights risks and violations and to demand change.
We’re focussed – but we at the Center are focussed on sport and the footprint of sports events and the value chains of sport. So while any one sporting event can’t solve all human rights challenges in a country, hosting such an event comes with responsibilities, including commitment to international standards on human rights, and to engaging stakeholders. So, what lessons can we learn from these events? Well, we must all expect that before future events are awarded, transparent due diligence processes take place, where human rights risks are assessed, and plans to mitigate them are drawn up, and then they’re delivered upon. It also means that supply chains supporting the safe and successful delivery of events must be free of labour abuses, and that athletes, fans, the medias and others must be able to take part in an environment that offers safety and dignity.
So, finally, to touch on a couple of the framing questions for this session, you talk about sport taking a stronger stance on global issues, and the future of sports in a polarised world, and, yes, these are challenges, but for us, a human-rights-based approach offers the foundation. Human rights are universal, international standards, and it’s important we use this normative basis as a firm ground for building a world of responsible sport. Thanks, Bennet.
Bennett Freeman
Oh, thank you, Mary, just perfect wrap-up here, building off the terrific comments from Jonas and Minky. In the interests of time, I’m going to want to just put one challenging question to the panel, just one, and give each panellist a minute, 90 seconds each to give a quick response, and then I’d like to open up to the audience, ‘cause I do see some questions.
So, picking up on what you just said, Mary, about the responsibilities of the host – of both host Governments, but also the sports federations themselves, the importance of elevating human rights standards, and picking up on Jonas’s comments about some of the tensions between neutrality and, I guess, my word, not yours, I would say, neutrality and morality when it comes to human rights, and what those trade-offs and balances are. And also referring back to Minky’s frank assessment of the issues connected with both the Government of China and Qatar, I’ve got to ask the big question. It’s such a hard one, but here it is. Is it desirable, and if so, even remotely possible, to have human rights criteria built into this selection of the host countries themselves? These are meant to be appropriately non-political events yet, I think, as we all agree, at least on the panel, human rights are not meant to be political, they’re universal.
Is it desirable and realistic to build human rights criteria into the selection? And then, in terms of the actual operation of the Games, both FIFA and the IOC have elaborate human rights frameworks, but the whole issue is, is the implementation, which has been lacking, particularly, if I can make the observation, on the part of the IOC, with Beijing.
So, over to the three of you for quick responses to a very big question. Any one of you can start.
Mary Harvey
I’ll hit that right up front.
Bennett Freeman
Please.
Mary Harvey
Yes, the answer’s yes, and we at the Center believe that, one of our Sporting Chance Principles is that every country, every single country in the world has human rights challenges. It’s a part of the human condition, it is the case, and every country should be able to participate in bidding for mega sporting events, if there’s a bidding process.
It’s the process, and it’s the requirements for that process, and before I came to the Center, I was a member of the bid team for the 2026 FIFA World Cup that had a North American footprint, and that was the first time that we had to, as a bidding entity, contemplate hosting an event amid four pages of mouse print on human rights requirements, that referenced the UN Guiding Principles and referenced the ILO labour standards, it referenced internationally recognised human rights, it referred to the UN Guiding Principles of Due Diligence. And so it’s the process of going through where you acknowledge, here’s what the right – the risks are, with preparing to bid and host an event, and here’s what steps we’re going to take, in consultation with those affected, this gets to Jonas’s point, right, on consulting with athletes, consulting, Minky, with people in the communities that live there, consulting with workers, looking at supply chains, and saying, here’s what we’re going to do to mitigate those risks that we’ve identified.
And then, once you do that, you put in place a system where you’re checking, so, the transparency and the due diligence to check, are we finding and identifying what risks are there, and are we offering remedy when harms occur? So, given that, and we’re seeing that now with the 2026 World Cup as the first World Cup that’s been awarded with that sort of process, we’re seeing that now take into effect. So, it is possible, but it’s in the process, it’s not in whether or not, from a geopolitical standpoint, any one country should or shouldn’t bid.
Bennett Freeman
Great. Thanks for that, Mary, terrific. Minky.
Minky Worden
Yeah, I want to say that the human rights strategy that was – that Mary led, with the united bid, is really something that ought to be studied by all sports organisations. It includes – you know, the due – the boring but important UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights say you have to do four things. You have to do human rights due diligence, right, you have to know what the problem is, and there are serious problems, for example, in Mexico with the disappearance of Journalists, in Canada with the indigenous rights, and treatment of indigenous communities, and the United States on a whole host of areas, including racial justice and…
Mary Harvey
Human rights.
Minky Worden
…and human rights across the board. So, right, so, the requirements are human rights due diligence, monitoring, because conditions can change, right? China changed for the worse between 2015 and 2022. Remediation, that means if somebody – if you’ve done something wrong, make it right, right? Pay compensation to the families of workers who died in building a stadium.
And then finally, be transparent, say what bad thing happened, what your role was in it and what you did about it. And the real problem, I think, is that this human, human rights bidding requirements absolutely should be the standard across all sport. There shouldn’t be any event anywhere, not the local gymnastics competition or Little League baseball, or the Olympics, there should be no event that takes place without assessing risks. And those risks are, first of all, to athletes, especially children, because we’re talking about millions of children in the so-called Olympic system. That is really the biggest imperative at this moment.
And then finally I would say, on the need for human rights bidding assessments, the expansion of the World Cup, as proposed by the President, Gianni Infantino, could include future hosts such as Saudi Arabia, which made a very strong bid too, for the expansion in 2022, or China, which was already awarded the Club World Cup before the pandemic. So, I – this is not a hypothetical discussion, this is a very real discussion and one of the resolutions, following these Olympics in China and the World Cup in Qatar, is that there should never again be a major sporting event awarded without those human rights considerations locked in.
Bennett Freeman
Terrific, thank you for that very direct answer, Minky, as I would expect. Jonas, do you want to come in on this one? It’s such a fundamental question.
Jonas Baer-Hoffman
Yeah, and, I mean, Mary and, and Minky touched upon, I think, the, the ramification of the bidding procedures in very good terms, so there’s not a whole lot I need to add on this, but I’d like to quickly just also emphasise, there is a downstream impact of these events. We’re talking a lot about now the events themselves and the process of getting to the events.
These events are oftentimes the singular funding mechanism of these international sport systems, and that is fantastic, because a lot of great things are being funded, because it is such an effective, you know, property in our societies, if you will. But the funding, the redistribution systems that come from this mega-event also create enormous risks, and I think both Minky and Mary talked in their opening about abuse, and there’s many things I could talk about, but I wanted to quickly touch on that.
We’ve been working for the last few years increasingly in representing, defending, supporting victims of, of sexualised crimes, harassment, rape, abuse in any form, and in every case that we’ve ran, and, trust me, there are many, many, many to come, because we’re just building up a wave that is going to be flooding sport in the next few years, in any one of those cases have we found structural, systematic abuse constructs that are built around the power that is generated by the social, the societal, the political and the economic status that is given to these institutions and the people leading those institutions, that is being misused to create relationships of dependency, that is being used to groom individuals into these crimes, etc., etc.
And when you organise this event, and you hopefully do it in the future in a human-rights-compliant manner and in a conscious manner around human rights, please also look at what the proceeds of such an event, when you go into redistribution, do. Because they create not only opportunity to fund great grassroots programmes and to fund professional sports leagues and all of this, but they also create many, many risks, and they give power to many, many people that we repeatedly see are abuse. And sports currently is rather incapable, if not blindsiding the consequence of – for thousands of people around the world, every day who are suffering from these crimes, within these systems. And there are structural causes that are just as important, that are indirectly connected also to these mega-events, ‘cause they’re what’s driving the revenue to actually fund the system of power and therefore dependencies that are being misused.
So, I just wanted to create that correlation, where it’s really a systematic question that encapsulates really everything in sport.
Bennett Freeman
Great, thanks for that, Jonas, and we’re now going to turn right to the audience, and I see several questions in the Q&A function, and there’s one that really I’d like to start with that pivots almost perfectly off the comment Jonas made just 20 or 30 seconds ago about referring to the, kind of, economic and financial support structures here and the, sort of, economic infrastructure, ecosystem, if you will, behind the IOC and FIFA.
So, I’m going to read this question. It’s just really one line. “To what extent does finance and commercialism in sport muddy attempts to effectively address human rights issues in sports?” And let me just add on maybe my own further extension to the question, which is, what responsibilities do the corporate sponsors have, but whether of IOC or FIFA, that you feel that they’ve not been exercising adequately thus far, particularly with respect to what we’ve seen with the Beijing Olympics so far? So, any one or two or three of you, but quick answers, because we’ve got several other fascinating questions to get to as well.
Mary Harvey
I could take a very quick initial – I mean, any time you’re dealing with power imbalances, and Minky Worden taught me this early on when I started work in human rights, any time you’re talking about imbalances of power, and that’s usually resourcing, that’s where human rights abuses, it creates fertile ground for them to happen. So, in that, sort of, environment where you do have, you know, concentrations of power, be it influence or money, that comes with it responsibility to do due diligence around what possibly could happen here when you have that kind of concentration. And that’s a lot of what Jonas was referring to.
Minky Worden
Yeah. If I can answer…
Bennett Freeman
Please.
Minky Worden
…the question on two levels, and I, first of all, want to compliment Jonas and FIFPRO for the incredible support that they have provided to survivors of sexual abuse who – whistle-blowers and others. This is the kind of support that makes these horrific abuses possible to come to light, and that type of support is really financial support, legal support, trauma support. There’s no substitute for it, and that is a – that’s a big change that’s really due to Jonas’s leadership.
And I also want to say, the Center for Sport and Human Rights has been tackling the fundamental problem behind that epidemic of abuse. And in case you think I’m overstating this here, this is two Presidents of national football federations, in Afghanistan and Haiti, who were sexually abusing the women and girls of the national team, many of them teenagers. We’ve documented abuses against men and boys in Haiti, and also against women in Mali, and of course, the world will remember the so-called Olympic Doctor, Larry Nassar, who was able to abuse women and girls for many years without – even after he was reported. So I think the main – you know, in a way, these problems are easily dealt with, with political will at the top, and I think the biggest problem within the Olympic system and within FIFA is that they don’t have what we call fit-for-purpose systems to deal with these problems. Systems that address the fact that these leaders of sport federations may also control criminal gangs, who can attempt to kill whistle-blowers or players who come forward with abuse.
Systems that would deal with the fact that these players need trauma support, and for example, giving testimony in Zurich to a panel of white men would be very traumatising for women athletes of colour from around the world. So there are lots of systems that can be put in place with goodwill that will address these things. I think the sponsors, for their part, are underwriting these Games, right, literally paying for them, billions of dollars. They’re doing it so to associate themselves with the athletes’ achievements, so if you want to cheer for your women’s team at the World Cup, you need to be very aware that women and girls, in order to get to the Women’s World Cup, might have to run a gauntlet of sexual abuse and harassment that goes on for decades.
So, that’s, that’s the fundamental challenge within sport, is that sponsors have not stepped up in any meaningful way to address sexual abuse, and they also, I think, have not stepped up to demand that the International Olympic Committee, for example, adopt the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Of the 13 so-called top sponsors, those are the Olympic partners, that’s the Olympic sponsorship programme, 12 of the 13 have adopted the UN Guiding Principles themselves, they have Human Rights Managers. The only exception is Alibaba, the Chinese company, and I think it is a concern increasingly that companies in authoritarian countries like China might step forward as these sponsors, and might be less willing to apply pressure for fundamental reforms.
Bennett Freeman
Minky, thanks for that. Jonas, I want to give you a quick choice, whether you’d like to also respond to this question that you helped spark in your – the end of your opening remarks, and addressing specifically, you think, the responsibilities of the sponsors. Or we could pivot to a couple of questions I’d like to bundle together to focus on, back on the athletes themselves, freedom of expression and protest. Your choice. You can do the first…
Jonas Baer-Hoffman
Please, let’s go ahead, more questions, it makes it more interesting.
Bennett Freeman
Okay, very, very good. So, here are two related questions from different participants here. One is, “What impact would major sporting or sports stars have in boycotting global events, in addressing human rights issues?! And then a second, related question from another participant is, “What support structures are now in place to support athletes that try to make a stand on their own against injustice and structural issues in global sport?” And that question refers to the lack of support, at least on the part of the NFL, the National Football League in the United States, to Colin Kaepernick, and his essentially getting frozen out of the sport, in the US.
So, I’d like to give Jonas the first crack at that, but no doubt, Mary, from her perspective at the Center, talks to athletes all the time, a former Olympian herself, and I know that Minky and Human Rights Watch have also been directly involved in talking with, briefing athletes. So, why don’t the three of you all take a crack at that one, beginning with Jonas?
Jonas Baer-Hoffman
Yeah, thank you. They’re not straightforward answers, right? They’re not black and white ones. First of all, I would say, athletes around the world are awakening to their own power. It’s very, very obvious. Colin Kaepernick is an example of great public awareness, but if you see how many athletes are starting to speak about what happens in their communities, the values that they want to represent, there’s a great shift. There’s a greater understanding of their platforms, and there is very interesting data behind it.
When you just look at modern way of consumption of information, the social media platforms of the elite athletes around the world are a lot more powerful and further-reaching than their clubs or national federations, and they’re starting to understand this. Now, athletes have been for a long, long time socialised to be this white canvas that every Coach can basically write the tactics on that he or she wants, and any sponsor can stick their logo on, and basically commercialise. And you’re seeing a change in the appreciation for the – by these athletes of themselves, that they can and should, where they feel empowered to do so, speak for what they value in society, and the things they believe in. So, would they have enormous power, of course, to change these questions? Yes, but I would also like people to appreciate that, you know, we’re now talking about the Olympics. Most of these athletes going to the Olympics, they’ll be on a flashy TV production, and they go home and they live under pretty mediocre conditions, because unless you win a medal there, your chances of living a lifestyle like many people imagine are tiny.
They have one or two chances to do so in their career, if they’re the best in their country at their sport. So, the question of moralising their participation is really not fair to them. In the context of Qatar, there was boycott conversation for the last period, and frankly, if you wanted to have that conversation, it was way too late, because at the time where you had the conversation, it would not actually have benefited the workers on the ground who are suffering for the last – for the many, many last years.
So, boycott is a complex question, but athletes, away from boycott, obviously have increasing power and are utilising more and more their power to drive things in their sport and in their communities, and that’s obviously where the second question comes in, and again it’s not a straightforward answer. In some environments, yes, so, like Minky talked about, whistle-blowers or, for example, sexual abuse are fortunately finding, slowly but surely, more support systems to blow up power structures in their sport, in their countries, but still in tiny pockets compared to the overall ecosystem of sport.
Some athletes, speaking out for issues around mental health or discrimination and racism, are finding actually themselves in communities where they receive a lot of support. But at the same time, the overall culture in sport, when you look at management, and let’s put it in a – in the labour term, is still one where embracing the athletes as human beings with all their quirks, opinions, strengths and weaknesses is quite rare. And Colin Kaepernick is the perfect example. It was an uncomfortable mirror that he put up, and it was obviously one around a line that is drawn in the US society that is much bigger than sports, but that is amplified in sport. But of course, it basically ended his career, and – most likely. Let’s see, maybe somebody still signs him, but I think the odds are not very good. But in our movement of organising athletes and unions across sports, you know, our members at some point abolished a maximum wage.
Our members abolished restrictions to choose an employer at the end of your contract, and oftentimes the athletes, whether it’s a Curt Flood in the United States, or a Jean-Marc Bosman, a footballer in Europe, they paid with their careers, because they tend to get frozen out, and then organisations like ourselves do our best to support them, and I think we’re getting better at it. We’re not getting it right all the time, but we’re getting better at it. But the system is not yet embracing criticism and challenge in the way that a system that speaks for values as it portrays actually should.
Bennett Freeman
Great. Thank you very much, Jonas. So, I’m looking at the clock. We’ve got two minutes left, and I’d like to invite Minky and Mary to also comment on this issue related to athletes’ freedom of expression, protest, their choices, but also build into your answer, but for not more than 60 seconds each, ‘cause we’re running out of time, any final, quick point, and I think that what we just heard from Jonas is a good wrap-up from him, if I could say so, in the interests of time. But Minky, Mary, whichever of you’d like to go first.
Mary Harvey
I’ll let Minky go first.
Minky Worden
Yeah, just I want to first pick up on Jonas’s important points, and I think the idea that athletes have human rights has to constantly be repeated. There’s some concept that they have to surrender their rights to compete in the World Cup or in the Olympics, and that’s absolutely incorrect. They also have the right not to speak if they don’t want to, and that’s a choice that Human Rights Watch supports.
But the one thing they shouldn’t be is threatened to shut up, and whether that’s in the United States, where you hear Commentators say that “Athletes should shut up and play,” or whether they’re implicitly told that this is the case by Yang Shu, the Deputy Director of the Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, who said they’d be punished under Chinese law. That’s absolutely wrong, and we have to – we, you know, athletes really, I hope, will get together to say, “Never again,” after these Olympics are over.
And I also wanted to add that the athletes – I think Jonas made this point, but athletes are workers. That’s your job, so there was one – a question in the Q&A about whether the Formula One in Saudi Arabia, should athletes be going? For athletes like Formula One drivers, they’re contractually obligated to go wherever the sport federation takes them, and if the sport federation, Formula One, which ostensibly has a human rights policy, but doesn’t implement it, if that sports federation is taking the flagship race to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE, drivers are not in a position to say no. So, I think we need to really understand what is the complex working environment, and recognise that they – that athletes have the ability to speak out, but they don’t have the choice of where these Games are going, which brings us back, hello, to human rights bidding requirements.
Bennett Freeman
Yeah.
Minky Worden
And there should never again – the reckoning for this, you know, perfect storm year of an Olympics and a World Cup, the two – world’s two biggest events, hosted by serious human rights abusers, the reckoning here has to be that there must never again be a Games without human rights bidding requirements and human rights monitoring. So, it’s not just that you have it at the outset, it’s that you have it during, and then you have it after.
Bennett Freeman
Minky, thank you for that, perfect. Mary, final word to you, before we close out.
Mary Harvey
So, the only thing I’d have to say on the athletes’ side, above what’s already been said, is athletes are incredibly vulnerable, right? They may seem like superhuman beings, incredibly vulnerable, and winning a gold medal at the Olympics is not a life-changing event financially. I’m here to tell you that, ‘cause I won a gold medal in the Olympics and, you know, I had paid for grad school, and that was about it. So, you know, I – it – athletes are incredibly vulnerable, and a lot of assumptions are made, but you don’t have sport without athletes.
But the final thing I want to say about the event itself and this year we’re in is, this can’t be, sort of, the year – you know, this is about what this year means, going forward, right? Does the world change? And we hope it does, and I will make one point, is that I don’t think you can put Beijing and Qatar in the same bucket. In Qatar, for example, there’s been labour reform, there’s been legislative change, and when civil society brings up, “Hey, we have concerns. Hey, this isn’t okay,” there’s at least someone to pick up the phone and say, “Okay, let’s talk about it.”
There is that engagement in civil soci – with civil society that you haven’t seen in other parts, and they’ve done that. They’ve made that choice to do that, and it isn’t domestically popular, and yet they do it. So, I think that’s an important distinction to make, because a lot of progress has been made, and hopefully it’s the start of, you know, more progress that will continue as things go ahead, which would be, I have to say, a great legacy.
Bennett Freeman
A great legacy indeed, and a hopeful note on which to end, as we get through this tough year, but thanks to the three of you, to Mary, to Minky, to Jonas. I also want to thank Tom Chappell, Chatham House, for organising the event, others at Chatham House who helped facilitate, and most of all, thank the audience for joining us in what indeed, I think, proved to be a timely and, I hope, challenging, stimulating discussion. Thank you so much.
