IOC Denies Approving China’s Web Censorship

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The New York Sun

BEIJING — The International Olympic Committee is denying that it approved China’s plan to censor Internet access at the main press venues here, notwithstanding a top Olympic official’s comment that the committee’s leadership seemed to have done just that.

“The IOC would like to stress that no deal with the Chinese authorities to censor the Internet has ever in any way been entered into,” a spokeswoman for the committee, Emmanuelle Moreau, said in a written statement yesterday.

RELATED: Great Firewall of China.

The official statement followed an interview in which the head of the Olympic press commission, Kevan Gosper, said he felt like the “fall guy” for promising journalists that China would provide unfettered Web access. “I suspect an agreement has been reached or an understanding has been reached,” Mr. Gosper told Associated Press Television News. “It may well have been done by the executive board, done in another place by very senior people in the IOC. … I only know the ground rules on censorship have changed.”

Journalists working at the Main Press Center inside the Olympic compound and at another site, the Beijing International Media Center, discovered this week that they could not access the Web sites of a variety of human rights organizations, as well as groups active in issues surrounding Tibet and a spiritual group banned in China, Falun Gong.

A New York Sun reporter who visited the two press centers yesterday found access blocked to dozens of Web sites, including those of Amnesty International, Freedom House, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. The State Department Web site was freely accessible, but clicking on a link to the most recent report on human rights in China caused a part of the report to appear, only to be replaced with an error message that the “connection was reset.” An attempt to load a Wikipedia page on the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 produced a similar result. Sites belonging to the White House and the Taiwanese mission in Washington loaded without difficulty.

“This certainly isn’t what we guaranteed the international media and it’s certainly contrary to normal circumstances of reporting on Olympic Games,” Mr. Gosper told AP.

Ms. Moreau said senior officials held meetings yesterday to press the Beijing organizing committee to restore full access. “The issues were put on the table and the IOC requested that the Olympic Games hosts address them,” she said. Chinese officials committed to address the matter promptly. “We trust them to keep their promise,” she said.

There was no public sign of flexibility yesterday from the Chinese, who promised only “sufficient” Web access. “We hope the media could respect relevant laws and regulations of China,” a Chinese Olympic spokesman, Sun Weide, said. “The Internet is regulated according to law in China, just like in other countries.”


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