Bahrain-Merida biking group getting used to ‘sportswash’, campaigners say

Campaign businesses have written to the UCI, biking’s governing body, protesting at its licensing of the Bahrain-Merida team, and the team’s participation within the Tour de France, because of worries for human rights.

In the letter, beneath the umbrella of the Sport and Rights Alliance and led using the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (Bird), the signatories claim that the team, led through the 2014 Tour winner Vincenzo Nibali, is a car for the Bahrain authorities to “sportswash” its appalling human rights abuses.
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“The Bahraini government has a reputation for the use of high-profile carrying events to divert international interest from the United States’ appalling human rights file,” the letter states, “and we are concerned that Bahrain-Merida’s participation in UCI competitions is consistent with these goals.”

Addressed personally to the UCI president, David Lappartient, the letter alleges that the Bahrain-Merida crew can violate the UCI’s code of ethics, which requires participants to “show commitment to an ethical attitude”.

The signatories, also such as Transparency International Germany and the Committee to Protect Journalists, urge the UCI to reveal its overview of the crew’s good compliance conducted as part of the licensing method, and not forget the human rights abuses highlighted when reviewing the group’s licence for next season.

Bahrain-Merida has vehemently denied the allegations, arguing that they may be sick-focused and illogical because the crew is entirely distinct and cut loose from the Bahraini government.

The global problem for human rights has centred on the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain because the regime’s brutal crackdown on popular demonstrations at some point of the 2011 Arab spring, wherein 28 civilians died, along with five individuals who had been tortured at the same time as in the authorities’ custody.

The maximum recent Amnesty global report, for 2017-18, noted in the letter, cited deepening repression, along with the deaths of 5 guys and one toddler, and masses of humans injured, due to immoderate pressure together with live ammunition being used against protestors; “ratings of humans sentenced to lengthy prison phrases after unfair trials”, and as a minimum a hundred and fifty human beings stripped of their nationality.

Citing “a massive-scale marketing campaign to clamp down on all styles of dissent”, Amnesty referred to media regulations which include the closure of Bahrain’s most unadorned unbiased newspaper, al-Wasat, the concentration of journalists, and the pronounced torture of human rights defenders and political activists.

The signatories draw attention in their letter to the fact that the Bahrain-Merida team was launched in 2017 using a son of the ruling king of Bahrain, Sheikh Nasser bin Hamad al-Khalifa, who is nonetheless defined because of the crew’s leader on its website. The website states that the group challenge commenced “with an informal motorbike experience inside the wasteland of Bahrain between His Highness Sheikh Nasser and Vincenzo Nibali”.

A brigadier widely spread within the Bahrain army and commander of the Royal Guard, Sheikh Nasser, is a senior figure inside the country’s sports activities institutions, chairing the Olympic committee till March this year. In 2011 he called publicly, on television, for the punishment of sportspeople who had taken element in demonstrations, saying: “To everybody that demands the fall of the regime, can also a wall fall on their heads … whether he is an athlete, an activist or a baby-kisser … Today is the judgment day.”

More than one hundred fifty expert sportspeople have been suggested to have been arrested, detained, tortured, imprisoned, or excluded from their sports during the crackdown, for enjoying seasoned democracy demonstrations. Representatives of Sheikh Nasser say that he had no private involvement in identifying any athletes, nor in any suspensions or arrests.