The World Cup: Beautiful Games, Blemished

by Giovanni Mejia · 2010-03-15 14:55:00 UTC
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SoccerOnce every four years the World Cup provides a global forum to bring the world together and celebrate the highest triumphs of collective will and human ambition. Those precious few weeks serve as a spectacle that can reach across borders, creeds, and ideologies. Luckily for all of us, whether attending or watching from our cozy homes, we won’t have to deal with the dreary image of poor people! (Heavy sarcasm intended.)

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Raquel Rolnik, recently laid into FIFA, football’s global governing body, for its silence on South African housing rights violations. Her report came in response to various allegations of forced relocations in anticipation of the 2010 World Cup. One such instance was the removal of 20,000 denizens from a Cape Town settlement. For the World Cup, a tournament that hinges on the talents of poor and working class youths from around the globe, the irony of forcibly displacing impoverished communities from their homes to facilitate wealthy tourists is rich.

South Africa’s actions, and the silent acquiescence of FIFA, are only the latest instance of the troubling trend toward removing the more undesirable segments of society in anticipation of global sporting events. Similar beautification projects have been par for the course in the run-up to various Olympic Games, including the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 1996 Atlanta Games. In the time period from 1987 to 2007, over two million people were displaced from their homes as a result of Olympic Games preparations. As has been the case in the latest South Africa example, already-disadvantaged poor and minority communities were disproportionately impacted.

World Cup and Olympics organizers are not the only sports institutions willing to be complicit in, or at the very least ignore, the rights of minorities and the poor. Indeed, as a Dodgers fan for many years, I can’t help but feel a tinge of regret anytime I crack a smile at Chavez Ravine. However, the Olympics and the World Cup occur on the biggest of stages and they respectively carry a normative weight matched by few other events. Wrong in any context, the unfair persecution of the underprivileged is even more perverse in the context of events that, superficial as they may seem, can serve as recognition of the world’s shared humanity.

Photo credit: DMahendra

Giovanni Mejia is a member of the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School.
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