This House Would...
This House Would...
EP2: Should countries with poor human rights be allowed to host the Olympics?
In this new format here at THW, Noah, Heather, and Eric sit down on a Saturday morning to talk about a variety of debate topics. For this month's episodes, we prepare and discuss motions on the Olympics, Olympic athletes, and their relations to common problems in today's world. Today, we bring the conversation towards how the Olympics should navigate through the human rights differences between countries and the IOC's power to negotiate for a better world.
Credits:
Hosts: Noah Pinno, Heather Yuan, Eric Jiang
Editor: Eric Jiang
Cover Art: @onlyooh_
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Do you have a suggestion for a topic you would like to hear about? Feedback on how we can improve? Let us know by emailing us at thwdebatepodcast@gmail.com
Hi, everyone, welcome back to the second episode of th w debate podcast in our new format. Today in the studio with us is Eric Noah, what up? Hey, and I'm here to my name is Heather. And we're super excited to continue on with this month's category of topics related to the Olympics. Last week, our topic focused on Tokyo 2020. And more specifically, the question was, should the Tokyo 2020 Olympics have been canceled? Today, the topic that we're focusing on is this house as the International Olympic Committee would not permit the Olympics to take place in countries with poor human rights records. So before we dive into all the technicalities of the topic, I just want to take a moment and reflect like, when I first read this motion, the first kind of examples and cases I thought about where Bayesian 2022 that's coming up, because there's been a lot of controversies around that surrounding, you know, my North treatment of minorities by the Chinese government. And then something else I thought about was Tokyo 2020, which just happened. And we first spoke about this briefly in our previous episode, where we talked about the rising sun flag controversy, and how this how it reflected Imperial Japan ruling over a lot of Asian countries, and how, you know, they initially were not willing to take it down, but later on did. So I think these two things bring up kind of an interesting dynamic because Beijing 2022 controversies highlight current human rights violations, and Tokyo 2020 Rising Sun flag was historical, it was past atrocities. So those are kind of the two examples that are like sitting right atop my head. But before we do get into that, I think it's important that we break down this motion first, because taking it all the way back, the motion sounds pretty self explanatory for human rights records, diagnoses involved. And we think, you know, the IOC should not permit the Olympics to take place. But I don't think it's as simple as that.
Noah Pinno:I don't think so either. I think starting with a close reading is probably the best place to get started. And I always think it's useful to think about why the CIA set this motion to maybe guide your interpretation, especially if you don't know what the motion means. But keep in mind that often motions like this are still open ended. So you're not bound by something in the new cycle, just because it's in the news cycle, you don't have to consider it as basically emotion about China or about Tokyo. So if we read the motion closely, there's a couple of pieces that I want to really flag. But I'm going to start right from the beginning this house as the International Olympic Committee. Now, whenever you see this house, as a certain actor, a certain stakeholder or a certain group or person, that is always your sign that you're actually debating from the perspective of that group, which means ultimately, you're going to want to tie all or at least most of your impacts most of your claims, most of your ideas to your key actor. So to demonstrate the difference of how this might actually look, I want to talk about two ways that you could reword this motion into normal language that make this difference really, really obvious. So in one rewording, you might take this house as the International Olympic Committee would not permit the Olympics to take place in countries with poor human rights records. You might say, the Olympics should not be held in countries with poor human rights records. So this is basically phrasing it as an event should not occur somewhere. It's disconnecting it from a perspective. And that means that in this reading, you'd assume that the perspective is just you know, us, generally society, the international community. But consider putting it in this rewording this question, is it in the interest of the International Olympic Committee to stop these countries from hosting, and suddenly the tone changes? because now you're talking about if that group would want this to be the outcome if this group would want this policy to be put in place in their own self interest? Yeah, exactly. So that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to strictly use self interest when you're debating these emotions. But I think that that rewording is really important to note because the tendency for people when they read debates, is to reword it like the former way, the former way, which is just should the Olympics block bids from countries with poor human rights records, and that's not always correct, and your biggest sign is this house as a group. You would also see this in lots of essay prompts, but they're usually a bit clearer and essay prompts because teachers don't want you to make that confusion. But in debates in particular, that is your structure that indicates you're putting yourself in another group stream
Heather Yuan:Yeah, and I think those minute differences, then change the way you would perceive the motion. Because from what I know, before we get into jumping into actually talking about the IOC and their interest and what they care about. I feel like the way the IOC has been presented, at least in media and through the news is they're very bureaucratic, and they want to establish themselves as an international body. But I think, before jumping into actually characterizing them, I think it's important to realize that while we can comment on the fact that they are bureaucratic, I think it's important to realize that like, bureaucracy serves a purpose, and it serves a goal. And no organization ever is exempt from making bureaucratic decisions. So I don't think we should go in being like, oh, the IOC is a bad actor, they just, you know, care about money, and they just, you know, want to, like, have international presence, I think there's more to it than than just what they're framed as,
Eric Jiang:of course, and they have actions, they have taken to demonstrate that they have much more considerations other than their own well being
Noah Pinno:So I've seen a lot of characterizations of organizations that often see them as kind of cold on calculating, mainly rational, but actually, that's not really, in my opinion, the best, or at least the most immediate way to characterize the IOC, or really any organization, because you know, as Heather mentioned, like, bureaucracy is not inherently bad, it serves a purpose. And we tend to view actor emotions as like, oh, it has to be super strict, from their perspective has to be in the self interest, it has to be assuming things that are rational. But sometimes bureaucracies do things for efficiency, sometimes they do things because it saves time or money. Sometimes they do things because it's always been that way. And there's no reason to give oversight to something new. So the IOC has these limitations. But they also have, you know, interest that they do for a purpose. And that means that well, the IOC isn't a perfect actor, that also doesn't mean that the things that complicate this motion are, they're bad, or they're wrong. So I really encourage people when you're debating from the perspective of another group, or another person, to try and embrace the nuances that make this group different and not view it as like a weakness or a limitation, something that leads them to make mistakes, rather just something else that goes in the equation. In this case, I think the things that go in the equation that are a bit more important to note about the International Olympic Committee, they are seen as the authority on the Olympics, and they probably care very heavily about the Olympics, continuing to be important in the international community, to be supported to be popular to be treated as significant by other countries. And that, I think, is their main goal. So since we know that they have that main goal, but also that they're a bureaucracy, and they might have a more bureaucratic way of making decisions that can inform what they've done in the past and what they can change, and even what they're interested in.
Eric Jiang:But I know I earlier I said something about the IOC changing as well. So I wanted to mention that in 2020, actually, they implemented something new, and they actually change the way that host countries and host cities visually Olympics. So now it is no longer a singular bid, but more of a continuous non committal structure. And I will definitely get into that later,
Noah Pinno:something has definitely changed since this motion was set at SR provincials. So I've seen already a lot of changes of just the new cycle, a lot of changes about facts that we know. So of course, how we view this motion is might be a little bit different from anybody who attended that tournament. Now, the second thing I want to talk about, I actually think this is a much harder thing to tackle is poor human rights records. So people might look at that those words and like read the words on the page and be like, I know what human rights are. I know what a human rights record is. And I know what being poor at something is. So I'm sure that being poor human rights records is Oh, you're not very good at upholding human rights? Well, I suppose the Yes, but that's very surface level, right? So you'd want to actually interrogate what the poor human rights record would look like in practice. And I think what's needed here is not a definition of the terms. Or even Strictly speaking, what counts or doesn't count, but rather, the bigger picture of what is the poor human rights record going to look like on paper? What are examples of countries that we might cite as somewhere in the middle or on the safe end or on the not safe end? So of course, we should probably start by talking about human rights in general. I think people have different understandings of what human rights are about what counts and doesn't count. But the truth is that there is a whole wide of whole wide range of definitions, and some of them are maybe better. And some of them are worse. But honestly, I don't think there's one right definition.
Eric Jiang:Getting into this part of the debate, like there's such a huge aspect when talking about human rights that if you were to do a human rights related debate, that there's so much to cover, there are certain human rights that are very clear cut, for example, freedom of free speech, of peaceful assembly and press that we as Western democracies take for granted. And we always advocate for because it's easy to advocate for, right, it's something that is very clear cut that is written in our constitutions, that it is central to our democracy essentially, but also
Heather Yuan:economically we can afford
Eric Jiang:real Yeah, no, because the other more abstract ones such as discrimination, as conflict as ongoing conflict, illegitimate use of force or even like the critical ones, like neglect in social needs, that is one that we cannot easily measure. And we cannot easily advocate for in something like a Western democracy because a we don't have as much of this as, for example, a developing nation or an LDC. So
Noah Pinno:I think, human rights, I think, human rights definitions are something that will always lead to things that are missed out and things that are unsatisfactory about them. But what I would really point to for background knowledge in this topic, is you're going to have to explain how the IOC, the International Olympic Committee that is, would decide what is a human right, what meets the threshold for violating that human rights, and how they are judging this process. So one really common way that I heard suggested, or that I saw in rounds, was that people would say, oh, we'll just get the UN Human Rights Council. And they'll judge human rights for us. And we'll use that. So that way, we have a group that has authority that has a mandate that has expertise, and we're done. But there's a huge problem just with the Human Rights Council already, because the Human Rights Council is not very equal in who gets condemnations and who gets you know, me are mentioned in the committee. And some people never see any sort of condemnations.
Eric Jiang:And even the power of these condemnation is being brought into question as well.
Noah Pinno:Yeah, that's right. So the power of these condemnations is really just a strongly written letter. It's, it's nothing that changes that he policies, it doesn't come with a sanction or an invasion. So what this leads to is situations where countries like Israel, for example, will country singular because they have over half of all condemnations in the United Nations Human Rights Council. Regardless of regardless of where you stand on this issue, like I don't want that to become the center of this discussion. But I think we could probably all agree that 50% of the world's human rights violations are not committed by Israel, right? There's other countries that also deserve similar levels of attention, if not more, there are certain countries that we would want to see at least condemned or acknowledged for the human rights abuses. So here's an example of how kind of offloading your responsibility to define could actually bite you. Because if you were like, well, we'll just let the Human Rights Council decide, then your model would basically be as the real cat host, the Olympic Games, which is obviously not good, obviously problematic, and doesn't really answer the goals that you as a government team would want to set out. So unfortunately, there's not really somewhere neat that you can just say we trust their judgment. And you will have to decide, do things like economic rights, do things like social rights meet our definition? How important is free speech, how much free speech must be given? free speech is actually very honestly, continuous, like it's a bit of a spectrum in many different countries. And there might be only specific issues that are tightly controlled. So these are the types of judgments that we in this motion would be asking the International Olympic Committee to take on. And as a government team, you would want to think through these questions, what types of countries what types of violations? How severe violations? Are you maybe using like the UN watchdog? Maybe Amnesty International as your barometer?
Eric Jiang:So then, are you expecting in a debate? If you're gov, for example, are you expecting in a debate, to have to lay out all these parameters to build an entire model on how to judge human rights like in every human rights related debate,
Noah Pinno:I was actually talking to my friend Deb about this like the other day, and we're like remember back in like the early days when we were like back at the back of the day, where we would get like a policy motion, and we would spend the first like three or four minutes of our speech, just modeling to make it like a bullet proof and I think I think that we went away from that strategy for a good reason. First of all, you can't actually put arguments if you spend every little bit nitpicking to save yourself from a criticism from opposition. And secondly, because I think that a lot of these debates, including this one, is totally balanced, even knowing that there is no good government model. So all government models are gonna have limitations, but that's life. There's, there's no good definition, there's no law that's perfect. When we pick where human rights come from, or what counts as human rights. Even in the real world, there's obviously going to be issues, we're going to go to the lowest common denominator that all countries can agree on.
Heather Yuan:So I guess if our listeners are now listening to this part, and are now greatly confused as to how they should model this motion, because I think we've kind of been going around in a circle. I think the short answer is, you say we, we acknowledge there is the UN Human Rights Committee, and we acknowledge that there are the basic human rights that each countries have on their individual. And you acknowledge as well, that they come from different backgrounds, and the people who made them had different intentions and had different circumstances. And that's all that you can leave it on. But the long answer was what we just talked about, which is like it's very complicated, and trying to model everything out to the tee to make sure you're safe from criticism isn't going to do you any good
Eric Jiang:and defend yourself from a tsunami was like,
Noah Pinno:Yes, the other thing that I'd say is, when you're modeling a debate like this, you want to try to use general criteria, so that not everything has to be met, but list of types of things that you would consider clear cut, and then maybe give some examples of countries, I think, examples of where you'd stand on something subjective, like human rights, let alone poor human rights records, those kind of reference points really help. So if you said like, for example, this country is definitely not going to be able to host and this one is definitely gonna be able to coast and this one is one that's on the nice, maybe if they improve something, they'll be allowed to host. And that I think helps really well. But in all honesty, when I was preparing this with the kids that I work with, for coaching, we spent the most time on finding a model compared to any other part of the case or part of the speech. And in the end, I left it up to my teams to decide how big of a burden how big of a responsibility they're willing to take. So if you want to be really ambitious, and you want to say, guaranteeing a livable wage is a human right, well, then you're going to have to bear the burden that most countries are immediately banned from hosting the Olympics. And if that's what you want to defend, then by all means, defend it, it will be very principally consistent. But it's up to every team to decide how far they're willing to extend themselves. Are they going to take a very defensive case? And just take a lower burden and really prove that? Are they going to take a more extreme burden, but do that really well? And honestly, I think that the teams that we're coaching actually picked different models entirely, and they're both successful. So there is no right answer.
Eric Jiang:Yeah, but I think we've gotten enough into human rights now that it's, you know, no longer emotion about human rights. We've been talking for way too long. It's not No, it's no longer a motion about Olympics. So let's actually bring it back to the interest of the IOC, and how that affects his image, how it affects Olympic attendance, or the propensity of host countries to actually bid for it. And what are the moral responsibilities of the ICC to take a stance on human rights? What could this even change? Is this even effective? And realistically, like, would this even work?
Noah Pinno:Please do more of that unless of what we did in the debate round. Don't argue about your definitions, the whole debate, because it's not even possible to get good definitions for this motion. Honestly, it's
Eric Jiang:really it's just so hard to model as well.
Heather Yuan:Eric say, Eric, saying that, like he's an actual debater, it's hard to model. Every time I did policy debates,
Eric Jiang:just just okay for you guys as listeners, for context. Okay, I'm just about to go off. For context. We've been we've been at this for like two hours just debating off off screen and off off mic. Just debating this topic for hours. So we've learned
Heather Yuan:we've learned that Eric is now sick of talking about human rights. Okay, we went on. So yeah, so then Firstly, talking about the interests of the IOC. I think just principally speaking, whenever we're talking sorry, Eric, human rights abuses. from the iocs perspective, I think like Noah said earlier, as well as we're prepping is it's easy for people to assume that the IOC is simply like, financially, financially or economically incentivized to do things I would say I think on gov, you can definitely argue that one of the interests of the IOC is to actually uphold human rights violations or approve, uphold the uphold human rights violations, is
Noah Pinno:that right? uphold human rights,
Heather Yuan:I pulled him out right? There, they may be corrupt, but they ain't that corrupt. Maybe they are who conspiracy theory, theory theory. I have a list. So from the interests of the IOC standpoint, on gov, we can definitely assume that they do have an incentive to uphold human rights. And they should be principally and like principle a speaking, they should be doing so. And to the extent that they are literally the body that is in charge of ensuring the Olympics is run fairly, and they are the governing body for all the events as well, I think that means that they do have jurisdiction over this. Whereas on opp, you might say something like the IOC sole interest is to ensure the sporting event goes successfully, why should they have any incentive to, you know, really aggressively condemn or forcefully stop a country from hosting, similar to how we were talking about earlier, when we talked about the UN Human Rights Committee, they do extend that they go, like we said, was just to condemn, they send a strongly worded letter? Is there any one country? Yeah, you should just go one country as we've identified. But does anything happen? No. Do they actually enforce things? laws? changes regulations? No,
Noah Pinno:because it's not even possible for them, they have no mandate to enforce anything they put out
Heather Yuan:exactly. So why should we then put this into the iocs hands and expect them to literally reinforce changes of an entire nation and how their human rights have been governed for years,
Eric Jiang:we'll get into this too. But I think Heather, you you mentioned earlier that the IOC has the power to do so because they have actionable ships to bargain with, right? They have economic influence, they have a media presence, and they have an image of you know, this, like morally upstanding international body that they can potentially change, at least
Noah Pinno:they have more enforcement power for this, in these situations that a country wants, that was the Olympics,
Eric Jiang:now we're getting into some red candle. They're debating the actual efficacy of this, right. And that's what we'll get to this point, eventually. But let's just talk about some cases. So
Noah Pinno:if you were talking about the I want to say practical interest, I think maybe a better term is self interest, I still think that is something that is important. And you'll see that the clash actually reflects that between given up. So government will probably de emphasize some of the personal self interest in the name of a moral responsibility. Whereas opposition will try to say that those compete too heavily with your rational, quote unquote, rational self interest. So if we establish that, I think that generally, it's probably going to be a bit more up leaning, you'd probably see things like, not having further controversy, having less up in the air issues or less. Budget needs to adjudicate human rights, less direct consequences for controversy, or boycotts, or complaints or appeals from other countries. And of course, I think that there is a very practical concern for the IOC on its image, just seeming like you are not bringing politics into sports, or acting in a way that is unfair or inconsistent, let alone if you actually are acting in a way that's unfair and inconsistent. In fairness, though, I think that there are some practical self interest points for government as well. I think right now, human rights and caring about human rights overseas is very, very important for citizens worldwide. I also think that governments are very preoccupied with human rights as their framework for international relations, including countries that often don't have a good human rights track record, depending on how you define it. Of course, there's no good way. So those are, of course, still image self interest points that you can credit to Gov. But honestly, I think the main class here is going to reflect how heavily self interest ways, even though there are arguments on either side.
Heather Yuan:Okay, so know why you listed off like a bunch of really good, practical or self interest from the IOC standpoint, I think if we were to look at it then from a different lens as to what could have potentially been the change, which is actually coincidentally our second area of clash. I think I think we should start this off by talking about Rio 2016. Because this is a sample Yeah, yeah. As a passive sample. This was an example where if we were to turn this case on its head and look at it from Rio's perspective, or look at it from Brazil's perspective. So, during Rio 2016, and to give some context, the government elected to erect many metal fences and increase policing around favelas in order to ensure safety for tourists, but also to essentially preserve a pristine image of the country.
Noah Pinno:People often talk about hiding the problem or sweep things under the rug. But this is literally hiding the problem.
Heather Yuan:Literally the fences were erected to hide the problem and to give some background about favelas as well. So favelas are highly condensed self govern neighborhoods of squatters. So this was back in the day when even then housing prices were extremely unaffordable, so many chose to squat in areas and build their own infrastructure, run their own electricity and get their own water. However, what that meant was, because they were a self governed body without a lot of pre existing infrastructure, what that means is, these areas are not a well policed, they are not safe, there's a lot of criminal and gang activity in those areas. Secondly, it's extremely unsanitary. And that's resulted in a lot of infant high infant mortality rates. And it is caused diseases to spread spread widely across those areas. And so the Brazil the Brazilian government's answer to this was, well, like we said, let's erect some fences, make sure people don't see them. Because you know, these were in some of these fellows were in really popular and famous tourist areas. And what the IOC could have done, if we were to say, if we were to actually implement this as a practical thing, is to essentially prevent them from bidding, right? Because when you put in a bid and where you're literally committing to host Olympics, I think Rio 2016 cost the government like $14 billion dollars or something like that, 14 billion. And all that money, we can argue could have been put into literally more practical uses, like, maybe safeguard your football is better, right? Maybe do more than just hide the problem. And from a financial perspective, that was practically what the IOC could have done.
Eric Jiang:But see, here's the argument was like, Oh, these, this 14 billion could be repurposed for another thing is whether this 14 billion was going to be used in Olympics or not, like that 14 billion was not going to be used towards federal period. And I think this transitions perfectly to like, could the IOC is policing of the Rio Olympics, like actually have changed anything like what preventing the Rio Olympics from happening, actually changed Brazil's dance on human rights in relation to this footballs? Like, would it actually encourage countries to clean up beds in general, and to clean up domestic human rights abuses?
Noah Pinno:Something I want to point out here, too, is this entire example I think it's an excellent example for this debate. But it is predicated on the idea that you are considering economic rights as part of human rights record. That's something that is not considered as a human rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It's not considered explicitly in detail, at least most socio economic rights in un declarations of various rights. So this is a high burden already, you need to take this example. But it yields a very high reward, if you can prove it, because the high reward is you prevent abuses that would have occurred because of the hosting of the Olympics that had not even happened yet, that are mainly socio economic in nature. So again, if you're using this example, as government team, it's great material, but you are taking on a high burden in order to use it. Now I actually had the argument with my family last night, we were talking about this, and she was basically like, but Brazil has human rights issues anyways, like they have issues with environmental laws, indigenous policy, and lack of separation between police and military. That was like, Yeah, but so does like 70% of the world. So at the end of the day, it's gonna be relative anyways, and you're gonna have to set the line at some point. So if you were even considering socio economic rights, when there have been a whole larger list beforehand, as well for Brazil. And these are the types of issues that your model can create for your argument, which is why it's important to think about which cases you think are good examples or bad examples of countries that are allowed to host and use that as your benchmark.
Heather Yuan:I think if, while we could see on one hand we have Brazil a very complex issue where there's no necessarily like black and white to this. But if we were to turn our heads now to Sochi Olympics,
Eric Jiang:so clear cut,
Heather Yuan:it was Exactly very clear cut, it was clear that the government was had set laws, I think back in 2013, even though Putin himself was already have shown that he's very anti LGBTQ, the laws were enacted in 2013. abundant, okay, so in 2013, he enacted a set of anti LGBTQ laws in 2014 Sochi Olympics happened. So this was a case where USA was really hesitant in sending athletes to the Olympics. And amidst rising tension between the US and Russia, this just added fuel to the fire.
Noah Pinno:There was a lot going on contextually. At that time, I think some of our younger viewers might have been too young to really understand the climate or see the connections between what was happening and culture. There was starting in the early 2010s, a very big movement to be vocally open about your support of the queer community, especially about gay marriage in particular, which resulted in the Supreme Court decision in the US to legalize gay marriage in 2012. This is also like when in pop culture, you saw shows like modern family really start to normalize and embrace queer characters, of course, within a more like, traditional nuclear family confined, but in the same sense, it was becoming very, very mainstream, it was something that people were no longer feeling stigmatized to talk about, or be open about if they were queer themselves. And there was a very successful athletes, Tom Daley, who I don't know if he is retired for Olympics. Now
Heather Yuan:he's not he just competed. Oh, actually, maybe
Noah Pinno:for the next one. I'm not sure yeah. But regardless, he's very famous, very well decorated, has won many awards. And I mean, not insignificantly, he has very attractive has a very attractive boyfriend. And that, of course, contributes to his popularity and how much authority he has, as an advocate, which he's been very outspoken about queer participation in sports. And it is also, I think, an arena where no pun intended, but sports is an arena where queer openness has always lagged behind in our society, because of the stigma that exists for being in same gender environments. And that was really, you know, was revolutionary at the time, in a way, it opened a lot of eyes and changed a lot of attitudes. So of course, this became the media focus around Sochi. And that's that was a moment where there was a lot of public outcry about Sochi, or Russia in general, being the host of the Olympics, but also a newfound concern about the role of human rights with regards to local populations, as well as athlete and participants safety. And that's something that has often been brought up by groups or countries that could be victims due to the policy of another country, but rarely on behalf of the international community. So in response to all of this, I honestly respond to all of this media coverage, there was media coverage, but that doesn't really say much, I suppose what is a better way of putting it is this was constantly in the media and the more it appeared in the media, the more it caught on and became something that by compulsion people felt the need to be very vocal about, not to say that it's misplaced by any stretch or not genuine. But it became a very vocal issue. And the media really helped to inflame this issue to really unheard of scales about concerns of human rights and safety at the Olympics. As a consequence, the Olympians were safe, and nothing changed. So in a way, there was part that was good, the Olympians, and I think for the most part, participants were able to participate. But did the media attention actually change anything in Russia, about their laws about their culture? No. And in all honesty, homophobia has continued to become more and more of a legal issue. And the cultural homophobia that is kind of reinforced by the schooling system, and by normative messages of the government has become more and more outspoken, even though the queer community in Russia has actually become more outspoken, more visible.
Heather Yuan:I think this ties us into kind of our third level of analysis, which is, now we're hitting the question, Is this even realistic? Does this even work? Because like Noah just said, if there were no changes from Russia, and it's great, you know, raising awareness and talking about issues is always important. But to the extent that nothing tangible has happened, why are we having this debate in the first place?
Noah Pinno:Well, here's the question I would pose to any government team, which is, if we saw what happened in Sochi, we saw that human rights abuses existed, that they had drastic repercussions for the queer community, and that media coverage did not change them. What would have happened in government's world? First of all, I think the most important question to ask is, would Russia have been allowed to host the Olympics, you may be inclined to assume on Gov. Well, of course, they have a poor human rights record, they wouldn't be allowed. But Russia is a very powerful country, Russia has a history of bribing members of the IOC. And Russia also has lots of geopolitical allies that can vouch for them in an Olympic setting. That's, of course, how they won the bid in the first place, right? You don't win those bids, without countries that are supporting your bid or your nation and what that represents. So honestly, I think there's a very real risk to this implementation, too. It's not just that we might have had the Sochi Olympics still happen in spite of these concerns. But that might actually signal that Russia is a country that gives that has a good human rights record. That is generally not as severely punitive to its core population, as the Western media might report. And I think all of those are actually negative image outcomes, right. And all of those come from an inability for government to prove that you can stop these types of situations.
Eric Jiang:And to add on to that as well, one of the first things that we assumed that one of the first things that we presumed as well in gov is that the IOC is has more power to address this issue, right, that the IOC has these bargaining chips to affect to directly affect the legislation in another country to address domestic human rights abuses. And with Sochi, it's a direct opposition to that assumption,
Noah Pinno:I think so for sure. I think it really pushes gov to prove that the IOC will stand up for what they actually believe in or that it's possible to stand up for what they believe in, let's even consider, I think another really relevant factor, which is, if we're already discussing which human rights will be counted, how many countries would recognize homophobia as a valid human rights, or consider the policies to be in violation of human rights. And the sad truth is that many countries, especially at that time, many Western countries still do not have legislative equality for the queer community. So the reality is in those situations, because it's not recognized as a human rights, because it's not the lowest common denominator, it might have not changed anything. And that is a failure of the international system more than it is of a government team. But it is something that the debate has to contend with what could be done with it if we're not confined by a debate.
Eric Jiang:So but no one you mentioned everything about the problems, the interactions that's not on the debaters to discuss, right. And in fact, the IOC has already debated this. And they have implemented changes to the bidding system in 2019, rather than 2020. That changes the way that host cities on host countries bid for the Olympics. They're trying to make a more permanent host system. And through this, they're actually implementing a more of a boxing ring style where, you know, they have 64 host cities with 32 in 32 countries that all compete simultaneously all the time continuously, and non committal. So there is a risk, there's a decrease of risk of bribery at any given time, because you have to constantly bribe and there is a increase of dialogue. So you can constantly keep track of what's going on in every country. And there's also going to be potentially decreases in environmental damage as you reuse cities, and also economic investment for cities to dump a huge amount of money for a new Olympic system.
Noah Pinno:Yeah, and I think, honestly a strength of that contribution on government, we had just talked about Brazil and how you open yourself up to a huge burden for rich rewards, but a huge burden by bringing in socio economic or even environmental rights. We didn't even talk about environmental rights and how that's not considered a human right, for some reason. But the Olympics has other means to solve this, right? So if they reuse cities, you address problems like Brazil, and you do that without having to decide on human rights. So now that's something that's a minimum guaranteed both sides, but it does mean that the government team might have a bit more of a mandate or a bit more of grounds or independent reason to consider human rights violations or potential human rights violations. Now that there is so much scrutiny on the bids long term, and now that there's continual continual pool of applicants,
Eric Jiang:exactly, but also that because it's a continuous pool of applicants, you said that there is continuous pressure for every single host city that is in that bid to continuously improve not just put a proposal one time, maybe enact some projects or proposals, and have deadlines. Oh, we're gonna complete this railroad or we're getting us or we're gonna come to This subway line or we're gonna complete these infrastructure upgrades. Two years before the Olympics, that's how we're gonna propose this bid and IOC is gonna be like, oh, wow, they're gonna complete this project then. But this, this is a continuous thing. So they have to continuously improve in order to be continuously competitive in this boxing fight.
Noah Pinno:In the short term, it's the cheapest and fastest to hide your problems, as we said, sometimes literally. But in the long term, it honestly becomes more cost effective for some of these countries, to just fix some of the abuses to fix some of the problems that exist, or at least it becomes stretched enough cost that it's possible to do that while also bidding. Of course, this is this is hotly contested, like does having privileges lead countries to long term improve their human rights? That's a whole debate in and of itself. But I think the framework is totally there for government to argue that the new criteria makes it way easier to consider human rights than it has been before. So who knows? Maybe there's a solution that is not invited into this debate into this dichotomy that actually gets rid of the problems of both sides. That's one of the limitations of debates. But of course, bringing in these types of slight alternatives can really improve your case, even this clash that, at least at first, to me, looks super, awfully meaning. And then Eric was researching and found out about this new structure, and I was like, Huh, there's a government.
Eric Jiang:Yeah, yeah. Because it's so heavy that like, you can argue that Oh, like there is no reasonable effect based on the case studies. It has happened before, but suddenly, like the IOC decided to change it a year ago or two years ago.
Noah Pinno:I know the class works. No,
Heather Yuan:no, I think our work here is done. I think Eric is ready to become a debate coach on this topic. debater so hopefully through today's episode, we were able to help you our listeners to understand this topic better understand or not understand it. I mean, I think we definitely confused them about human rights
Noah Pinno:misunderstand it in an organized way.
Heather Yuan:Exactly. So thank you, everyone for listening to this episode of th w. a podcast where we talked about the topic, this house as the International Olympic Committee would not permit the Olympics to take place in countries with poor human rights records. We look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you.