Nils van der Poel, double Olympic champion gives one of his medals to the family of an opponent of the Chinese regime

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The Swede has made a commitment to Amnesty International to denounce Beijing’s human rights violations.

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“The Chinese government used our dreams as a political weapon to legitimize the regime. I made it a personal issue and felt taken advantage of,” noted with bitterness the double Olympic speed skating champion Nils van der Poel in a press release from the NGO Amnesty International. The Swede therefore decided to react in his own way by giving Thursday, February 24, one of his two gold medals to the daughter of Gui Minhai, a Swedish-Chinese dissident imprisoned by the Xi Jinping regime.

A publisher in the semi-autonomous territory of Hong Kong, Gui Minhai published books on the politics and leadership of Communist China. Certainly arrested by the Chinese authorities during a vacation in Thailand in 2015, he was detained in an undisclosed location before being released. He was once again arrested by the authorities just months after his release on his way to Beijing accompanied by Swedish diplomats.

In February 2020, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for “having illegally provided information abroad”, by the Ningbo court. A case that has strained diplomatic relations between China and Sweden, which is demanding his immediate release.

“I want Gui Minhai be released. It’s a lot to ask, but it’s the only reasonable thing you can wish for.” he wrote in the Amnesty International press release. The organization wants international pressure to release dissidents in China to increase.

The speed skater had already criticized the holding of the Winter Games in Beijing upon his return to Sweden. “I think it is extremely irresponsible to give it to a country that is as clearly violating human rights as the Chinese regime,” had he dropped in the Swedish daily Aftonbladet.


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