[Congressional Bills 117th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H. Res. 162 Introduced in House (IH)]
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117th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. RES. 162
Urging that the International Olympic Committee rebid the 2022 Olympic
Winter Games, and expressing the sense of Congress that the United
States Olympic & Paralympic Committee should not participate if the
Games are held in the People's Republic of China and that the United
States Government should lead an international boycott if the Games are
held in the People's Republic of China, and for other purposes.
_______________________________________________________________________
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
February 24, 2021
Mr. Waltz (for himself, Mr. Reschenthaler, and Mr. Katko) submitted the
following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign
Affairs, and in addition to the Committee on Oversight and Reform, for
a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for
consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the
committee concerned
_______________________________________________________________________
RESOLUTION
Urging that the International Olympic Committee rebid the 2022 Olympic
Winter Games, and expressing the sense of Congress that the United
States Olympic & Paralympic Committee should not participate if the
Games are held in the People's Republic of China and that the United
States Government should lead an international boycott if the Games are
held in the People's Republic of China, and for other purposes.
Whereas, in 2015, the International Olympic Committee announced Beijing, the
capital city of the People's Republic of China, as the host city of the
2022 Olympic Winter Games;
Whereas the Olympic charter states the goal of Olympism is to promote ``a
peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity'';
Whereas, according to the September 2020 House of Representatives China Task
Force Report, the Government of China is the leading human rights abuser
in the world, depriving 1,400,000,000 human beings of their fundamental
rights;
Whereas, since 2017, the Government of China has detained and persecuted up to
1,800,000 Turkic Muslims, including ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz,
in ``political re-education'' centers, and many detainees who have not
``graduated'' from the facilities have been convicted of formal crimes
and sentenced to prison terms;
Whereas detained and imprisoned Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur
Autonomous Region (XUAR) are held arbitrarily and without due process,
coerced to disavow religious beliefs and cultural practices, forced to
work in factories, deprived of food and other essential needs, and
subjected to physical abuse, including torture and alleged organ
harvesting;
Whereas the Government of China is implementing a policy of employing large
numbers of Uyghurs, including former detainees, in labor-intensive
factories in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China under forced labor
conditions;
Whereas the Government of China has implemented policies against minority groups
in the XUAR to lower birth rates, including forced abortions,
sterilizations, and contraception;
Whereas according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an estimated
8,500 mosques have been demolished in the XUAR, and nearly 30 percent of
Islamic shrines, cemeteries, and other sites of religious importance in
the region have been damaged or destroyed, mostly since 2017;
Whereas the annual report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China for
2020 indicates--
(1) the Government of China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have
taken unprecedented steps in the last year to extend their repressive
policies through censorship, intimidation, and the detention of individuals
and groups for exercising their fundamental human rights, especially in the
XUAR and Hong Kong;
(2) in XUAR, it is now estimated that up to 1.8 million Uyghurs,
Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui, and others have been arbitrarily detained in a system
of extrajudicial mass internment camps where they are subjected to forced
labor, torture, and political indoctrination;
(3) forced labor in the XUAR is widespread and systematic and exists
within the mass internment camps and elsewhere throughout the region, as
part of a targeted campaign of repression against Turkic and Muslim
minorities;
(4) detention of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui, and others in mass
internment camps in the XUAR since around April 2017, and authorities have
also increasingly sentenced ethnic minority individuals to lengthy prison
terms for political reasons since 2017;
(5) in Hong Kong, the ``one country, two systems'' framework has been
dismantled, severely undermining the rule of law and respect for human
rights that the territory has long enjoyed, and authorities arrested
prodemocracy leaders, prevented journalists from reporting, applied
political pressure on the judiciary, and allowed the Hong Kong Police Force
to grow increasingly abusive toward nonviolent protesters; and
(6) the Government of China and CCP have further intensified campaigns
that aim to bring religion in China under closer official control, and
authorities have expanded campaigns to target, control, and surveil not
only religions deemed ``foreign'' like Christianity, Islam, and Tibetan
Buddhism, but also traditional Chinese religions;
Whereas Article 2 of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which both the United States and
China have ratified, defines genocide as ``any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the
group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the
group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [or]
(e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.'';
Whereas, on January 19, 2021, the Department of State determined that the
Government of China, under the direction and control of the CCP, ``has
committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other
ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang'', and on the same day,
Secretary of State Antony Blinken agreed, stating, ``forcing men, women
and children into concentration camps, trying to in effect re-educate
them to be adherents to the Chinese Communist Party--all of that speaks
to an effort to commit genocide'';
Whereas, in June 2020, the legislature of China passed a national security law
for Hong Kong restricting basic political rights and authorizing severe
punishments for anyone inside or outside Hong Kong found guilty of broad
vaguely defined crimes, effectively ending the longstanding ``one
country, two systems'' policy;
Whereas, in September 2020, the House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff
Report on the origins of the COVID-19 global pandemic found that--
(1) authorities in China harassed, detained, and disappeared
individuals who told the truth about the CCP's handling of the COVID-19
pandemic;
(2) during the early outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government
of China failed to meet an international legal requirement to inform the
World Health Organization of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, Hubei
Province, China;
(3) during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government of
China knew of the deadly human-to-human transmission capabilities of the
virus and took steps to hide it from the public and global community; and
(4) in February 2020, the Government of China nationalized their
medical supply chain to stockpile personal protective equipment and stop
foreign exports to other countries battling the COVID-19 pandemic;
Whereas the Department of State's 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP)
relating to the People's Republic of China--
(1) indicates that the Trafficking in Victims Protection Act defines
``severe forms'' of trafficking in persons as: sex trafficking in which a
commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the
person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age; or
the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a
person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion
for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt
bondage, or slavery;
(2) states that Tier 3 is the most severe category for trafficking
activity and defines Tier 3 as ``countries whose governments do not fully
comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to
do so''; and
(3) indicates that the Government of China has been designated in Tier
3 by the Department of State in the TIP since 2017;
Whereas, on February 3, 2021, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
reported several shocking and appalling firsthand accounts of an
organized system of mass rape, sexual abuse, and torture of the Uyghurs
in the XUAR;
Whereas, on February 11, 2021, the PRC banned the BBC for its reporting on human
rights abuses in XUAR;
Whereas, in October 2020, United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab stated,
regarding a potential boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics due to human
rights violations against the Uyghurs, that ``my instinct is to separate
sport from diplomacy and politics, but there comes a point where that
may not be possible'';
Whereas, in September 2020, an international coalition of human rights
organizations wrote to the International Olympic Committee requesting
the committee ``reverse its mistake in awarding Beijing the honor of
hosting the Winter Olympic Games in 2022'';
Whereas, in November 2020, the Australian Parliament debated a motion calling on
the ``Australian Government to work with the Australian Olympic
Committee to ensure Australia boycotts the 2022 Winter Olympics games in
Beijing'';
Whereas, in January 2020, the editorial board of The Washington Post opposed the
Government of China hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics and stated, ``the
world must ask whether China, slowly strangling an entire people, has
the moral standing to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. We think
not.'';
Whereas, in 1980, in H. Con. Res. 249, the House of Representatives voted 386 to
12, and the Senate voted 88 to 4, to urge the United States Olympic
Committee to propose the transfer or cancellation of the 1980 Summer
Olympics in Moscow; to urge the International Olympic Committee to adopt
such a proposal; and, if the International Olympic Committee rejected
the proposal, to urge the United States Olympic Committee and those of
other countries not to participate in the Games and to conduct
alternative games of their own, due to concerns over the Soviet Union's
invasion of Afghanistan;
Whereas since the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, the human rights record
and global authoritarian influence of China have severely worsened and
do not meet the values of Olympism; and
Whereas the Olympic Games is a celebration of international culture, a festival
of humanity, and is intended to be independent of political,
ideological, and diplomatic disagreements, but hosting the 2022 Winter
Olympics Games in the PRC, where organized atrocities in the XUAR are
ongoing, where the freedoms of Hong Kong's citizens are being trampled,
where the fundamental right to worship is brutally persecuted, and in
the wake of the ongoing global devastation from COVID-19, would be
immoral, unethical, and wrong: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives--
(1) supports the achievements of the athletes, coaches, and
personnel of the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee;
(2) affirms the values and goals of Olympism;
(3) urges the International Olympic Committee to rebid the
2022 Winter Olympics to a country that recognizes and respects
human rights;
(4) calls on the United States Olympic & Paralympic
Committee to support human rights and boycott the 2022 Winter
Olympics if held in the People's Republic of China; and
(5) calls on the Administration to support international
efforts toward a boycott of the 2022 Olympic Winter Games if
they are held in China.
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