VATICAN CITY (CNS): The director of the Vatican’s missionary news agency, Fides, has supported China’s successful bid to host the 2008 Olympic Games despite its poor human rights record, adding that the Sydney Olympics were awarded to a country guilty of marginalising millions of Aborigines.
The International Olympic Committee awarded the Summer Games to Beijing on July 13, despite concerns expressed over violations of human rights in China.
But Fides director, Fr Bernardo Cervellera, said refusing to give China a chance to host the
Games would have been unproductive and hypocritical.
The priest, a member of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, cannot be called ‘soft’ on China, a country where he worked and which he was officially invited to leave in 1997.
In an editorial the day before the Olympic committee voted, the priest said denying a country the chance to host the Games because of its human rights record ‘would seem to apply only to China’.
‘The Sydney Olympics were awarded to a country guilty of marginalising millions of Aborigines,’ he said.
