Pen center criticizes Bach: No Olympics without press freedom

It is stunned in the face of numerous reports that foreign journalists and reporters are spent and threatened by Chinese officials, it says in a message published on Tuesday. The reporting will be considerably restricted under the cover coat of strict zero-COVID policy through entry and access bans, without the International Olympic Committee would condemn this, criticizes the pen center.

The fact that the necessary criticism of human rights violations is sacrificed to commerce is as few remarkable as the constant massive intervention of the Chinese State into expression freedom. Where the freedom of the word is threatened, there is no sporty fair play. How could it be that the winter games take place in a country where death sentences enforces, authors and bloggers in prison die, ethnic minorities are being brutally suppressed and with Peng Squad a world-famous tennis player first disappears and then emerges again under mysterious circumstances? asked the German Authors Association.

Pen-Zentrum provides demands

The foldable to affirmative silence of the IOC President Thomas Bach to these incidents is deeply shameful. Those who propagate sports as an unpolitical form of international understanding, reveals its limitless political naivety and arranges back stress a totalitarian system, it continues.

Bach hounds with his behavior all victims of state repression policy. The Pen Center urged the immediate release of improper human rights activists and demanded all Olympic sponsors to immediately end their financial commitment to the winter games in Beijing.