The Olympic spirit has come to this: Two authoritarian countries are vying to host the 2022 Winter Games, competing to endure a huge financial strain for the benefit of burnishing their public image. The withdrawal of Oslo in October left Beijing, China’s capital, and Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, as the contenders. They formally submitted their bids to the International Olympic Committee this month.

That helps explain why the president of the International Olympic Committee, the German lawyer Thomas Bach, pushed through landmark human rights reforms at a big Olympic summit meeting in Monaco last month.

For the first time, host countries must sign a contract that requires protections for human rights, labor and the environment. These “international agreements and protocols” are meant to protect against abuses such as Russia’s anti-gay law, passed ahead of last year’s Winter Games in Sochi, and the labor and human rights abuses before and during the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. These reforms are about to get a rigorous test in the global spotlight — whether the 2022 Games are in China, which welcomed journalists to Beijing in 2008 with a censored Internet, or Kazakhstan, which locks up critics and closes down newspapers.

Over the past decade, Human Rights Watch has documented how major sporting events are also accompanied by human rights violations when games are awarded to serial human rights abusers. Repressive countries promised to respect media and other rights to secure the events, then reneged and relied on international sporting bodies to stay silent.


As these countries prepare for events, forced evictions without fair compensation free up space for the massive new infrastructure construction that Olympics require. Migrant workers are cheated and labor under long hours and sometimes deadly working conditions. Construction leads to environmental and other complaints. Activists who object are silenced or jailed. Beijing locked up critics of the Olympics. In Russia, an environmentalist drew a three-year prison sentence, and members of the feminist band Pussy Riot were beaten and detained, for their protests of the Sochi Games. Given the abuses, is there any hope for change?

If there is the political will to implement them, the contract reforms could improve conditions in countries that host big sporting events. Autocrats are increasingly turning to international sporting events to boost their global standing, so the regulations adopted by their governing bodies might be the only way to make human rights advances in some of the most abusive places.

At Sochi last year, for example, the I.O.C. pressured the Russian government to take action against the theft of wages from workers who helped build Olympic venues and infrastructure. Some 500 companies were investigated, and inspectors found that thousands of workers had been cheated out of more than $8 million in wages. The general director of a top construction company was arrested on suspicion of withholding wages. This action resulted from a specific reform from the 2009 Olympic Congress: a promise that the I.O.C. would intervene in the event of “serious abuses,” including abuses of migrant workers.

In Iran, hard-liners and reformists alike cheer the country’s volleyball successes. A law student, Ghoncheh Ghavami, was jailed in Iran’s notorious Evin prison last year after she protested a ban on women entering a stadium to watch an International Federation of Volleyball World League match. In November, the federation (known as FIVB, the acronym in French) called on the Iranian government to release Ms. Ghavami, and affirmed its commitment to “inclusivity and the right of women to participate in sport on an equal basis.” The federation warned that Iran’s policy could limit its ability to host international tournaments in the future. Ms. Ghavami was released on bail shortly thereafter, but not before a revolutionary court convicted her of “propaganda against the state” and sentenced her to one year in prison. She is appealing.

In 2012, Saudi Arabia allowed two women, at the last moment, to compete at the London Summer Games. But it still forbids sports for all girls in state schools and has no women’s sports federations. The Saudis should win a gold medal in brazenness for sending a 199-member men-only team to last fall’s Asian Games, claiming, “Technically, we weren’t ready to introduce any ladies.”

Human rights and sports crises are not limited to the Olympics. Russia, despite its record of worker abuse, was awarded the 2018 World Cup. This summer, authoritarian Azerbaijan will roll out the welcome mat for the first European Games in Baku, despite escalating repression, including the December arrest of a top investigative journalist.

As Qatar builds an estimated $200 billion of infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup, hundreds of South Asian migrant workers have died working on construction projects. FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, is ripe for institutional reform. In May, it will hold a once-in-a-generation presidential election, in which the current president, Sepp Blatter of Switzerland, will seek a fifth term against stiff competition, including Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, who has championed reforms to advance women’s participation. Those candidates should back human-rights-based reforms to the FIFA Charter and set out their position on the human rights, discrimination, corruption and labor crises that have dogged the body.

The Olympic reforms passed in December mean that if future host countries fail in their duty to uphold rights, the I.O.C. is now obliged to enforce the terms of the hosting agreement — including the ultimate sanction of withdrawing the Olympics. And for those who break rules like nondiscrimination, the punishment should be a ban on playing and hosting, as the I.O.C. imposed on apartheid South Africa from 1964 to 1992 and Taliban-run Afghanistan from 1999 to 2002.

Mr. Bach has started the ball rolling, but with abuses mounting around global sporting events, it’s time for other sporting federations like FIFA to begin reforms. Fans, corporate sponsors and the general public are increasingly turned off by human rights violations. The I.O.C. reforms aren’t a panacea, but they represent an important step forward.

Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, is the editor of “China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights.”

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I do not know Brian Lewis, president of the T&T Olympic Association, but in one stroke he has earned my admiration.
According to an ad on Radio I95.5 Lewis, accompanied by a few sporting and media personalities, intends to walk the full 26 miles of the T&T marathon route next Sunday to build momentum for the 2024 Olympics.
His goal? T&T must start preparing, from now, to win ten gold medals in that world celebration of athletic prowess.
Thank you, Brian. Somebody got it, finally!
I am hoping sometime soon, someone, somewhere in the national leadership will follow Lewis’ example of strategic thinking. But the vacancy up there is just part of the overall crisis that we face; instead, we get daily doses of irresponsibility and mediocrity.
Sadly, this is on display in the Government’s responses to the world energy crisis. Successive governments have talked repeatedly of the need to diversify the economy, particularly because of our dwindling oil and gas reserves and the severe consequences the country experiences with every cyclical crisis.
This Government has been no different. What is different is its failure to explain to the population the severe impact of the crisis on T&T, and the “new normal” being created. At the policy making level, this demands structural adjustments and drastic alterations in the expectations, spending and overall lifestyles at the level of the citizen.
To the Finance Minister’s credit, in the 2015 budget, he did explain his proposals to use two state enterprises, invesTT and exporTT, to stimulate activity in other sectors.
He proposed incentives in the areas of food and beverages, the creative arts, entertainment and maritime, yachting and financial services—what he called “the re-balancing of the economy in favour of the non-oil energy sector and the development of a sustainable economy”.
But in recent weeks all this has changed; every aspect of Government activity in 2015 demands much more than even the strategic thinking that Lewis has demonstrated.
Our immediate challenge is the falling revenues from the oil and gas sector. First, the Finance Minister, admittedly under personal pressure from his alleged role in the ten-year-old TCL insider trading issue, must convince the population that the Government possesses a strategic formula to deal with the shortfall.
Unfortunately his response—asking individual ministries for a $45 million cutback each—reflects haphazard analysis and poor evaluation of state resources, with little thought about the exploitation of possible alternatives.
Then there was the Prime Minister’s response, again ill-prepared and without the necessary budgetary evaluation, that her Government’s social and make-work programmes would be untouched.
At present, the Government needs to show that it has a long-term strategic understanding, and that it possesses a comprehensive framework, a conceptual map, to diversify the economy, probably into some high-end industries.
But to date, its performance has been all about not the politics of the common good, but the retaining of power. Last week, I warned that this year will unfold in three phases, the current “Seductive” phase, to be followed by the “Intimidatory”, then the “Blunderbuss”—a friend preferred the word, “Bazooka”—in which the masks are off, and any and everything goes, because it is not about strategic, national planning—but the retention of power.
It played out last week with the AG jumping to claim victory in Emailgate, because of a possible error in the judicial system. He was right, however. The Opposition Leader’s attorneys should have been more alert in the matter.
The country has entered the phase in which anything goes. So those attorneys should have been in “red alert” mode, particularly after the statements by the family of the late Dana Seetahal and the allegations of the former assistant sports director on social media.
Probably, that red alert should extend to the anticipated legal battles when the Opposition Leader is summoned in the Las Alturas Commission of Enquiry. That sitting begins next week.
In the meantime, I continue to search for the positives, such as Sunday’s 26-mile march in the T&T marathon.

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THE SPORTS Company of Trinidad and Tobago (SPORTT) will be making an evaluation of the repairs required to make the Dwight Yorke Stadium in Bacolet, Tobago OSHA-ready.

The stadium, which falls under SPORTT, was deemed unsafe and has not been in use, although the THA recently spent $14 million to replace the Mondo track last year.

Secretary of Education, Youth Affairs and Sport (DEYAS) Assemblyman, Huey Cadette, speaking at last Wednesday’s post-Executive Council media briefing at the Administrative Complex, Calder Hall, said a meeting was held at the stadium on December 31, 2014 to discuss its closure and the way forward for the sports facility. The meeting was attended by officials of his Division, headed by Assistant Secretary Assemblyman Jomo Pitt, the Ministry of Sport, the Sport Company and OSHA.

Cadette said, coming out of the meeting, the Sports Company agreed to make an evaluation of all the work to be done at the stadium while OSHA indicated that once the plumbing, electrical and air condition works were successfully completed, they would be prepared to give approval to use the track and the wider sporting areas.

He added that the Assembly now has to keep in contact with the company to ensure the work is done in a timely manner.

He said the Assembly was still awaiting the structural engineering assessment on the integrity of the main stand.

Cadette said the primary and secondary schools zonal championship is schedule to take place in March. “We are concerned that after a significant investment in the track our student athletes and our elite athletes would not have access to train or compete especially in a year when we would have the Pan American Games and World Championships; there is a need to have that track available for our athletes,” Cadette said.

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