No New Internet Cafes in run up to Beijing 2008 Games

China Continues Assault on Basic Freedoms
[London] Chinese state media announced today (1) that local governments were not to approve the opening of any new internet cafes in 2007. The directive is the latest in a series of assaults on media and internet freedoms in China and represents a further blow to the credibility of the International Olympics Committee's (IOC) assertion that the 2008 Olympic Games would "improve the situation of human rights" in China (2).
In June 2005 China announced plans to police web forums, chat rooms and blogs (3) in order to control online news and information; in September 2006 Xinhua announced new powers for it to regulate the release of news in China by foreign news agencies; in December 2006. The China Daily reported that foreign journalists wishing to travel to Tibet and Xinjiang to report would still have to obtain a special permit, despite an earlier commitment by Olympics Press Chief, Sun Weija, in September 2006 that foreign journalists "can travel anywhere in China. There will be no restrictions." (4)

"Seven years of assurances from the IOC that media and internet freedoms would improve in China in the run up to the Olympics have come to nothing," said Matt Whitticase of Free Tibet Campaign. "Interested only in the huge profits a Games in China will generate, the IOC has constantly ignored China's brutal and escalating crackdown on media freedoms. Its refusal to force China to allow free reporting amounts to complicity in China's human rights abuses in Tibet and China as China knows it can act with impunity. The IOC must now insist that China honours its pledges to full media freedoms if the Games are not to be tarnished irreparably by association with one of the world's most repressive regimes."

Contact: Matt Whitticase 020 7324 4605 or 07904 063 746.

Notes to Editor:

(1) http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/06/content_5806467.htm

(2) Jacques Rogge, President of the IOC, speaking in an interview to the Daily Telegraph, 15 June 2005.

(3) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4617657.stm

(4) http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=14029&t=1&c=1

In 2006 The Foreign Correspondents' Club in Beijing reported that it had received reports of 72 incidents of harassment of foreign journalists from 15 countries between 2004 and August 2006.