Human Rights Watch has accused the International Olympic Committee of being complicit in China’s rights abuses ahead of the 2022 Beijing Winter Games

This follows the IOC president’s call with Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai.

Peng disappeared for nearly three weeks after alleging on social media that China’s former Vice-Premier had sexually assaulted her, and since that time, nobody has been able to speak independently to her and all of her messages have been mediated through Chinese government run media, and or the International Olympic Committee.

Sophie Richardson is the Human Rights Watch China director and says there is something bigger at play here, while concerns grow about Peng’s wellbeing.

“I think will believe it when she is able to say that herself freely and directly. I mean, let’s recall that this is the government that says that everyone in the Uyghur region or Xinjiang western region of China is happy and fine, up to an including the millions of people who have been arbitrarily detained for months at a time,” Richardson told ticker NEWS.

“It’s the government that regularly refers to the Dalai Lama as a terrorist. So really to take only the Chinese government’s word for it, or a deeply vested body like the IOC is problematic.”

There have been repeated calls for the upcoming Olympic games to be boycotted.

Richardson says the statistics of sexual abuse in China are disturbing and it’s not just for famous athletes.

“One fear is that what happens to these allegations is what happens to a lot of allegations about sexual violence and harassment inside China, which is that they’re ignored,” she said.

“A recent government report suggested that one in every four women in China is subjected at some point in her life to domestic violence,

“Yet there are very few prosecutions of that there’s only a law about domestic violence until relatively recently. This is enormously problematic.”

Richardson says Peng’s story is going to persist through the games in February as one of the examples, not just the Chinese government’s brutality towards individuals, even famous people like star athletes, but also why it is “just an inappropriate government to host an Olympic Games. Absolutely.”

What is the Human Rights Watch doing to support?

Richardson says the organisation is certainly going to keep leaning on the IOC to reveal what it knows about the origins of that call and the circumstances.

“But we’ve also called on the top sponsors of the games, the companies that literally pay for the games, to do their own human rights due diligence to explain how their sponsorship doesn’t contribute to problems,” she said.

“We’ve called on governments to engage in a diplomatic boycott of the games, because the last thing that trainees officialdom needs right now is a greater imprimatur of legitimacy, particularly from democratic governments.”