Opinion: With the Qatar World Cup underway, the country’s human rights abuses are coming to light. However, Qatar is not the only country hosting a world-stage event that has committed these abuses and is still rewarded by the global sports industry.
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Since my previous coverage of the Qatar World Cup, Qatar really isn’t helping itself alleviate the situation.
Despite officials stating LGBTQ+ fans will be free to express themselves during the World Cup, FIFA has told several fans to remove items or articles of clothing that feature a rainbow or any rainbow coloring.
Two German fans were forcibly pulled aside by security before entering the stadium and told that they could either throw away their rainbow armbands or security would call the police.
Several Welsh fans were also prohibited by FIFA from entering the stadium while wearing rainbow-colored bucket hats. The Welsh Football Association responded by stating that FIFA had told the association the week before that rainbows would be permitted in the stadiums.
FIFA even detained a US journalist for trying to wear a rainbow shirt. Grant Wahl said he was asked to take off his shirt, and his phone was taken away after Tweeting about the incident. He later received an apology from a FIFA representative, but FIFA isn’t letting the issue go.
Captains from several European countries and the United States were set to wear rainbow armbands even though FIFA had placed economic sanctions against the teams. However, FIFA then threatened, just hours before the matches began, that any player wearing a “One Love” armband would be given a yellow card — two yellow cards and the player is sent off the field.
The teams were fully prepared to pay the fines, but FIFA could not accept a tournament in which rainbows were at all displayed.
In a joint statement from the European soccer teams’ associations, they said, “We are very frustrated by the FIFA decision, which we believe is unprecedented.” They also pledged to express their support for inclusion by other means.
While Qatar was chosen to host the World Cup through bribery and corruption, it is not the first or last country that will be given the privilege of hosting a world-stage event despite committing human rights abuses.
Earlier this year, Beijing hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics, becoming the first city in the world to have hosted both the summer and winter events.
The event was quickly met with backlash from several countries over the claims that China was actively committing genocide against the Uyghur people.
Over the past few years, China has been detaining Uyghurs against their will into a large network of what the state calls “re-education camps.” Hundreds of thousands have also been sentenced to prison terms.
Additionally, in a report by Adrian Zenz, Uyghur women have been threatened with internment in these camps if they exceed the birth quota or refuse to have an abortion. Many women were also involuntarily fitted with IUDs or coerced into sterilization surgery.
The United States, the U.K., Canada and the Netherlands have therefore stated that the actions by China against the Uyghur people fall under the U.N. definition of genocide, which states “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These acts include killing or seriously causing harm to members of the group, inflicting conditions of life intended to bring about destruction, imposing measures to prevent births and forcibly transferring children of the group to another.
Leading up to the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee stood with China, hiding behind the statement that the Olympic games are apolitical — that while they cannot prevent conflict, they are an example of everyone in the world respecting one another.
The U.S. ultimately diplomatically boycotted the Beijing Olympics by not sending any diplomatic or official representation to the games. Though U.S. competitors still received full support from the country.
This isn’t the first time the United States has boycotted the Olympics. In 1980, the U.S. boycotted the Moscow Summer Olympics over the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. As a result, the Soviet Union and 13 other countries boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Human rights organizations even urged the U.S. to boycott the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics over the Nazi persecution of the German Jewish population.
The Olympics have never been apolitical, nor have any other world-stage event. While athletes can come together to represent their nations, the leaders of these nations don’t simply abandon global politics and conflicts as a result.
However, boycotting doesn’t actually punish the host country. It is simply symbolic in bringing awareness to the issues rather than actively working to solve them.
That being said, a way to enact concrete actions against countries with human rights abuses is to prohibit them from hosting world-stage events altogether.
More than 100 countries have records of human rights abuses, and in 2018, the Global Slavery Index reported more than 167 countries have a percentage of their populations living in modern-day slavery.
Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea and Sudan are the most socially repressive of these countries. Following closely in line though are Syria, Somalia, Turkmenistan, Libya, Cuba and Saudi Arabia, where the populations suffer from the most severe human rights abuses.
Saudi Arabia holds political prisoners in detention, democracy is silenced by methods of intimidation and arrests and women have no social standing, yet the country is still able to make a bid for the 2030 World Cup.
If Saudi Arabia is successful in being granted the privilege of hosting the World Cup, it will take a lot more than boycotting and the failures of FIFA to hold the country accountable. Even so, they should not have the opportunity to make a bid for it.
It is long overdue that international organizations such as FIFA and the IOC take a hard look at what countries are eligible for world-stage events and prohibit those that violate the fundamental rights of their populations.
