Page 19 - THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE’S ACCOUNTABILITY FOR HARMFUL CONSEQUENCES OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES- A MULTI-METHOD INTERNATIONAL LEGAL ANALYSIS Ryan Gautier

Chapter One – Introduction
military regime.39 The 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics and the 2010 Vancouver Olympics featured heated debates over the treatment of aboriginal peoples.40 The 2014 Sochi Olympic Games were overshadowed by a Russian law prohibiting the dissemination of “pro-homosexual propaganda”.41 And of course, the 2008 Beijing Olympics set off a host of protests regarding human rights concerns in China such as freedom of speech, religion, and the autonomy and independence of Tibet.42 These are problems that would exist whether or not the Olympic Games took place in that country. The IOC is not bound by international law, a topic that I will return to, and as such is not required by international law to ‘fix’ the human rights situations in any of these countries. It may be debatable, for instance, whether or not the Games should be awarded to countries that have significant human rights problems, or if the Games should be removed upon the discovery of human rights abuses. However, it is too much of a stretch that the IOC has a positive duty to improve the human rights situation in a host state.
A second set of human rights issues associated with the Olympic Games are those that specifically relate to the practice of sport. Consider for instance, the status of women at the Olympics. During the ancient Olympics, only free men who spoke Greek were allowed to compete in the Games, disenfranchising a sizeable segment of the population. More striking, married women were not allowed to watch the Games, on penalty of death, potentially because they were too ‘impure’ to witness the sacred rights.43 Jumping forward to the twentieth century, women remain at the periphery of the Olympics. Although women were allowed to participate in the Olympics as of 1900, their participation was limited to only certain events. The 1928 Amsterdam Summer Olympics was a negative turning point
39 Black and Bezanson (n 37); Julie H. Liu, ‘Lighting the Torch of Human Rights: The Olympic Games as a Vehicle for Human Rights Reform’ (2007) 5 Northwest Journal of International Human Rights 213, 220–23 (arguing that Olympic Games hastened South Korea’s transition to a democratic country).
40 For Sydney, see Brett Neilson, ‘Bodies of Protest: Performing Citizenship at the 2000 Olympic Games’ (2002) 16 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 13. For Vancouver, see Christine M. O’Bonsawin, ‘‘No Olympics on Stolen Native Land’: Contesting Olympic Narratives and Asserting Indigenous Rights Within the Discourse of the 2010 Vancouver Games’ in Russell Field and Bruce Kidd (eds) Forty Years of Sport and Social Change, 1968-2008 (Routledge 2011).
41 See, e.g., Andrew Roth, ‘Athletes in Sochi to be Barred from Advocating Gay Causes’ New York Times (New York, 2 August 2013) B9.
42 Paul Close, ‘Olympiads as Mega-Events and the Pace of Globalization: Beijing 2008 in Context’ (2010) 27 The International Journal of the History of Sport 2976, 2988.
43 See Nigel Spivey, The Ancient Olympics (Oxford University Press 2004) 119; Judith Swaddling, The Ancient Olympic Games (University of Texas Press 1999) 40–41.
9