by Tenam
Paris April 2: As Paris revealed the route that the Olympics torch will take, her Mayor Bertrand Delanoe said the city hall will sport a giant banner in defense of human rights when the Olympic flame arrives here on April 7.
The historic Hotel de Ville, the city hall, will hang “a banner with the texts ‘Paris defends human rights everywhere in the world’ on city hall,” Delanoe told a press conference today.
The Socialist mayor said Paris hoped to defend the values “of all humanity and of human rights,” saying all people “have the same right to dignity, and I am thinking in particular of the Tibetan people.”
Similarly French athletes are planning to wear a distinctive sign showing their concern about human rights during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in August, double Olympic judo champion David Douillet said on Wednesday.
“We have things to say and we will say them,” Douillet, the joint president of the athletes’ recommission of the French Olympic committee, told a news conference in Paris.
On April 6, Tibetan Community of France will welcome former political prisoners of Drapchi prison and Team Tibet athletes when they arrive from London with the Tibetan Freedom Torch. The Beijing torch will arrive in Paris on 7 April from London. Tibetans, Tibetan supporters and other human rights activists have vowed to make their presence felt around the route.
Tibetans will be joined by Tibetan supporters, Uighurs, Chinese democracy activist, Taiwanese student group, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Committee Organisation for Boycott of Beijing Games on 7 April at Trocadero near the Eiffel Tower for a day-long protest “against Chinese repression in Tibet and China and to defend Human Rights, justice, liberty and democracy in Asia”, said a press release by the Tibetan Community of France..
“Every time the flame crosses a city we will be there to say, ‘Don’t forget the reality of Tibet, don’t forget the reality of China’,” said Reporter Sans Frontiers head Robert Menard, who is calling for a boycott of the August 8 Olympic opening ceremony.
The first torch bearer in Paris will be former world 400 metres hurdles champion Stephane Diagana. “I think you can speak out and let the torch travel to Beijing as well but you must send the message to China that they failed to meet their commitments,” Diagana was quoted as saying by Reuters.
French pole vaulter Romain Mesnil, and the President of the Union of French Athletes pointed out that like most of his peers, he wants to show that the “athletes have a civic conscience and cannot close our eyes to the lack of progress of China vis-à-vis respect of human rights”. He called on for an initiative by the athletes, suggesting they could wear a green ribbon during the Games in Beijing.
About 80 athletes will carry the torch over a 28-kilometer route that begins from the first floor of Eiffel tower around 12:35 PM and snakes round the Trocadero, Arc de Triumph, down the famous Champs-Elysees street, then toward City Hall, then crosses over the river Seine to the left bank past the National Assembly, before ending at around 5 PM at the Charlety stadium in the southern edge of Paris.
