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GUI MINHAI

Swedish Olympian gives gold medal to imprisoned bookseller Gui Minhai

Swedish speed skater Nils van der Poel has given one of the two gold medals he won in Beijing to Chinese-Swedish dissident Gui Minhai to protest against China's human rights violations, Amnesty International said in a press statement on Friday.

Published: 25 February 2022 15:22 CET
Swedish Olympian gives gold medal to imprisoned bookseller Gui Minhai
Swedish Olympic gold medalist Nils van der Poel met Angela Gui, daughter of imprisoned publisher Gui Minhai in Cambridge on Thursday. Photo: Private

Van der Poel, who has been fiercely critical of the decision to award Beijing the Winter Olympic Games, on Thursday gave his 10,000-meter gold medal to Angela Gui, the daughter of bookseller Gui Minhai, who is serving 10 years in prison in China on charges of illegally providing intelligence abroad.

“I am not the voice of all Olympians, but me and my friends dedicated our lives to strive for excellence within sports, and the Chinese government chose to use our dreams as a political weapon to legitimise their regime,” Van der Poel said in a statement published by Amnesty International.

“I wish for the human rights issues in China to improve and for Gui Minhai to be set free. It’s a lot to ask but it is the only reasonable thing to ask.”

Angela Gui, who lives in the UK, accepted the medal five days after the end of the Games. “He came to see me in Cambridge yesterday, where I accepted his medal on my father’s behalf. I think he’d feel beyond honoured if he knew”, she wrote on Twitter.

‘Extremely irresponsible’

Van der Poel was scathing in his criticism of Beijing upon his return to Sweden from the Games.

The Olympics “are a fantastic sporting event where the world and nations meet”, he told Swedish daily Aftonbladet on February 13th. But hosting the Games “is what Hitler did before he invaded Poland and that’s what Russia did before it invaded Ukraine”, he said, referring to the 2014 Sochi Games held just before Russia invaded Crimea. “I think it’s extremely irresponsible to give the Games to a country that so clearly violates human rights like China’s regime does”.

Gui is one of five Hong Kong-based booksellers who disappeared in late 2015 after publishing books critical of the Chinese government. Gui disappeared while on holiday in Thailand in 2015 and resurfaced in China, where he served two years in prison. A few months after his October 2017 release he was again arrested, this time while on a train to Beijing with Swedish diplomats. He was then hit with the 10-year jail term in 2020.

Gui Minhai was born in China but moved to Scandinavia following the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, and later became a Swedish citizen. Sweden has repeatedly called for his release. China insists the matter is an internal affair and has been stung by criticism from Sweden. China does not recognise dual citizenship, and Chinese officials claimed he voluntarily reinstated his Chinese citizenship in 2018.

Sweden insists he remains a citizen.

As recently as January this year, Swedish publishers demanded Gui Minhai’s immediate release from prison in China, arguing that China had arrested Gui on “loose grounds”. The allegation that he provided intelligence to a foreign country “seems to have been pulled out of thin air and casts long shadows over China”.

Amnesty called on the international community to increase pressure on China to release its dissidents. “Governments across the world should follow Nils’ lead by stepping up efforts to hold the Chinese government to account — not just over the unjust prosecution of Gui Minhai, but over its treatment of the many others jailed solely for peacefully exercising their rights”, Alkan Akad, a China expert at Amnesty, said.

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SPORT

EXPLAINED: Why is Swedish cricket facing a scandal?

As recently as 2015, cricket was welcomed into the Swedish Sports Confederation (RF) as the fastest growing sport in the country. Now, nine years later, the sport has lost state funding and is risking expulsion from the confederation. What happened?

Published: 4 April 2024 14:16 CEST
EXPLAINED: Why is Swedish cricket facing a scandal?

In May last year, RF withdrew the Swedish Cricket Association’s funding due to problems with the association’s democracy.

One of the chief issues, according to RF, is that the cricket association has regularly held extra yearly meetings, with different factions within Swedish cricket using these as an opportunity to express their lack of confidence in the association’s board, regularly dismissing and reappointing different board members.

“Something was not right,” Björn Eriksson, RF chairman between 2015 and 2023, told SVT in its new mini documentary on Swedish cricket.

So, what happened?

In April 2019, the association held an annual general meeting (AGM), where the current chairman, Tariq Suwak, was elected. A few months later in December, this board was dismissed at an extraordinary general meeting.

Between 2021 and 2022, two AGMs and four extraordinary general meetings were held, with some members of the board replaced in 2021 and again in 2022, where Suwak was again appointed chairman.

In spring last year, RF withdrew state funding after an external investigation by Ernst and Young determined that the association’s leadership lacked the ability to lead, was incapable of carrying out long-term structural work to improve the association, lacked transparency and did not have the same level of democracy as other sport associations in Sweden.

“We believe that the association’s management and much of the rest of its activities are permeated by a poor understanding of how associational democracy should work,” the report stated. “Amendments to the statutes and extraordinary annual general meetings are used as a weapon to counteract people with dissenting views.”

“What they say in the report, it’s the truth,” cricket association chairman Tariq Suwak told SVT. “It’s a fair description of Swedish cricket”.

The report also stated that there was a lack of dialogue between association members and its board, which Suwak agrees with.

“I’ve felt the same way, as have many others… that there’s a lack of dialogue with the board. An extraordinary general meeting has felt like the only forum for asking questions and communicating with those who make the decisions,” he told SVT.

In a statement on its website, RF explained its decision to withdraw funding as “based on serious deviations from the values of sport and deviations from the member association’s obligations regarding auditors and auditing according to RF statutes”.

According to SVT’s documentary, the issue appears to be that certain groups have tried to adapt Swedish cricket to the benefit of their own club, for example by getting involved in deciding which teams will play each other, which teams will have the most home games, or even choosing the players for the national team.

Later that year, the club went through a financial crisis, ending the contracts of everyone in its headquarters. It was issued a list of necessary measures which need to be taken in order for it to requalify for economic support and remain a member of RF, including hosting courses in association democracy and tightening up the association’s statutes in order to “reduce the risk of non-democratic elements at annual meetings”.

What happens now?

In December last year, RF granted the cricket association a loan of 750,000 kronor “after the association could show that it has begun measures in accordance with the action plan which are going in a positive direction”.

“There are still major shortcomings, but we see a greater understanding from the association of what needs to be done, and a plan for carrying out that work,” SF vice chairman Toralf Nilsson said at the time.

“This gives us hope that they will be able to solve their challenges and create methods to work with democratic governance, prioritising knowledge of associations and work with where work to build knowledge of running an association as well as work on basic values must be prioritised.

The loan must be paid back by August 2024.

Do you know more about this? Get in touch with us at [email protected]. You can watch SVT Sport’s investigation into this topic here.

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