Brussels, 05/08/2004 (Agence Europe) - There are still no women athletes in five to six delegations for the Olympic Games to begin in Athens on 13 August, despite the efforts of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to bring in more mixed teams for sporting events. The Olympic Charter stipulates that any kind of discrimination toward a country or a person, whether for racial, religious or political, gender or other reasons, is incompatible with admission to the Olympic Movement. Ms Lizin, Belgian Senator and former MEP, plans to denounce this situation during a press conference on 11 August in Athens. On this occasion, she will present a report drawn up by the Belgian Senate's committee on external affairs and defence on the Olympic Games in Athens. Ms Sugier and Weil-Curiel, the French founders of the Atlanta-Sidney-Athens Committee, of which Anne-Marie Lizin is also a member, will speak of their struggle over the past twelve years in favour of women's participation in sporting events. Ms Bakoyanis, the Mayor of Athens, will for her part stress the importance of the event while Doctor on Sport Psychology Promodos Chamalidis will provide his personal views on the subject.
The "Atlanta+" Committee was formed in 1992 to denounce the lack of women in 35 delegations to the Games in Barcelona and has since conducted a campaign to remedy this situation. In 1996, the number of exclusively male delegations had been reduced to 26 (Iran had given way to pressure and sent one female athlete). During the Games in Sydney, in 2000, nine delegations still had no female participants. It is now certain that this number will be lower in Athens: one delegation of Afghan women athletes has been sent to Greece to defend the country's flag (Ms Haidar, Director of the Higher Education Department for Sports Coordination and Physical Education in Kabul and founder of the NEGAR association, which represents Afghan women in Europe, will speak at the conference) and Libya has also sent women athletes. There is still uncertainty for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, the Virgin Islands and Botswana. Ms Sugier stresses that this uncertainty will continue until the beginning of the Games as delegations can change the composition of their team up to the very last moment. "This is why we are holding our conference just before the Games open" in order to put final pressure on participant States, she confided. In her view, five or six delegations or not expected to give way. Ms Weil-Curiel says for her part that: "We must fight for our values. If some do not want to sign up to them, no-one forces them to come to the Olympic Games. The IOC has the duty to apply its own Charter. These countries thumb their nose at it and it puts up with it". Anna Diamantopoulou, who was European Commissioner for Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities at the time, had given her support, in February, for the "Atlanta+" Committee and sent a letter to the president of the Greek Olympic Committee in which she recalls the articles of the Olympic Charter denouncing all discrimination on race or gender and inviting it to put pressure on recalcitrant delegations (see EUROPE of 6 February).