The New York Times Blasts an Olympic Disgrace

The New York Times editorial page published a well-deserved spanking for the Olympic corporate sponsors, the US and other governments, and, especially, the International Olympic Committee for letting China get away with breaking its promises of improving its human rights record.

"To win the right to host the Games," the editorial reads, "Beijing promised to expand press freedoms for foreign reporters and implied that opening China to the world would help expand human rights more generally. We will never know whether China’s leaders intended to keep their word. What we do know is that the International Olympic Committee, corporate sponsors and governments around the world should have held China to its word. They have not, and China has read their silence as complicity."

The piece goes on to list the endless human rights violations the regime has committed in recent months, including jailing critics, denying visas to visiting journalists and silencing critics of the "shoddy construction that caused schools to crumble" during the Sichuan earthquake, among others.

The editorial correctly places most of the blame for this Olympic disgrace squarely on the shoulders of the IOC.

"Apart from China, no one deserves criticism more than the International Olympic Committee, the so-called guardian of the Olympic movement, which has indulged Beijing at every turn," it says. "The committee still has time to put in place minimal protections — like a 24-hour hot line for journalists to report violations of media freedoms. Even with all of the intimidation, human rights advocates (and maybe some athletes) will likely try to use the Games to protest China’s repression. Beijing needs to know that the world will be watching how it handles that bit of reality TV."

We will be watching all right.