China Revokes Darfur Activist's Visa to Olympics

Yesterday, Olympic gold medal speed skater Joey Cheek got word that his visa to enter China for the Olympics was revoked.

Cheek was heading to China not as an athlete, but as a human rights activist: He heads Team Darfur, a coalition of nearly 400 athletes, 72 of whom are competing in the upcoming Olympic games, who work to raise awareness about the genocide in Sudan's Darfur region. Team Darfur's advocacy has included criticism of the Chinese government's support of the regime in Darfur.

Cheek suspects his visa has been revoked because of his outspokenness against the Chinese government about its policies supporting the Sudanese government. But when he asked for an explanation as to why he's been shut out of the country, he was told that the Chinese visa office wasn't required to give one.

While it might not be much of a shock to hear that China is censoring speech, it's less known that the U.S. government does the same exact thing. It's a practice called ideological exclusion. The practice was born during the Cold War in an effort to keep suspected Communists out of the country — resurrected by the Patriot Act, today it's used by our government to keep out scholars, artists, and political figures whose views run contrary to the Bush administration's. (Check out our timeline of those who have been excluded in the past.).

The ACLU is fighting two cases of ideological exclusion. One is that of Professor Tariq Ramadan, a renowned scholar of Islam; the second is that of South African scholar Adam Habib. Both are academics the Departments of State and Homeland of Security (DHS) have excluded based on their political views. The ACLU suspects that Habib's criticism of the war in Iraq, and Ramadan’s criticism of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East are what's keeping these two noted scholars out of the country. The U.S. government’s actions are preventing Professor Ramadan and Professor Habib from attending speaking engagement in the U.S. and have the effect of censoring the ideas U.S. audiences are allowed to hear.

In both cases, the U.S., like China, originally refused to disclose its reason for excluding Professor Ramadan and Professor Habib. After the ACLU went to court, the government claimed that the exclusions were based on national security concerns. Melissa Goodman, one of the ACLU attorneys who's representing Habib and Ramadan, wrote in the U.K.'s Mail & Guardian last year:

National security should not to be used as a guise to silence critical or controversial views. By following a policy of ideological exclusion, the US government seems to be ignoring the hard lessons of history. When the Congress repealed the Cold War era communist exclusion laws, it determined that "it is not in the interests of the United States to establish one standard of ideology for citizens and another for foreigners who wish to visit the United States", and that ideological exclusion caused "the reputation of the United States as an open society, tolerant of divergent ideas" to suffer.

The imposition of an ideological litmus test at the border betrays those principles. What the US needs most is to be engaged with the world and open to criticism, not — isolated from it.

One of the reasons the International Olympic Committee awarded the upcoming games to China was to give that country the opportunity to show the world that its record on human rights has improved. But as both China and the U.S. have shown, it still has a long way to go.