
Olympics bigwigs dismissed human rights abuses behind closed doors
When Juan Antonio Samaranch Salisachs, the 2022 Beijing Olympics chief, met with Chinese dissidents in a closed-door October meeting, he firmly rejected their plea to relocate the games out of China to protest human rights abuses. “The world lives under very many political systems. We cannot go and say and endorse one or the other. That is not what we do,” Salisachs told activists, according to meeting minutes obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The activists were stunned. “[Salisachs] was talking to me as if he knows so much better than we do,” Frances Hui, a Hong Kong activist who attended the meeting, told the Free Beacon. “We were all in shock—they were so disrespectful to us.”
