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French footballer Antoine Griezmann announced on Thursday that he was ending his partnership with Huawei, citing “strong suspicions” about the telecoms giant’s involvement in the monitoring of the Uyghur Muslim minority by the Chinese authorities.
Antoine Griezmann whistles the final whistle with Huawei. The playmaker of the France team announced Thursday, December 10 to put “an immediate end to (its) partnership” with the Chinese company, citing “strong suspicions” about the participation of the telecoms giant in the surveillance of the Uyghur Muslim minority.
“Following strong suspicions that the Huawei company has contributed to the development of a ‘Uyghur alert’ thanks to facial recognition software, I announce that I am putting an immediate end to my partnership linking me to this company”, writes the Barcelona forward, who had a contract with the brand since 2017.
The 2018 world champion calls on “Huawei not to just deny these accusations but to take concrete actions as quickly as possible to condemn this mass repression of” the Uyghur minority “and to use its influence to contribute to respect for human rights. Man and Woman in society “.
Asked by AFP, Huawei France had not reacted in the middle of the afternoon.
A persecuted minority
Chinese companies have been accused in the past of having implemented facial recognition software to identify people of Uyghur appearance.
Again on Tuesday, Huawei was blamed in the United States for being involved in testing such detection software, according to research firm IPVM.
An internal report from the Chinese group (removed from Huawei’s site but still available on the Internet) indicated that this facial recognition software was in the testing phase to provide “alerts to the presence of Uyghurs” and made it possible to recognize “the age, sex, ethnicity “.
The United States-based human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Wednesday said in a report that Muslims were arrested in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang after being “reported. “by software that identifies suspicious behavior.
The Uyghurs are the main ethnic group in Xinjiang, a huge region in western China, bordering in particular Afghanistan and Pakistan.
According to foreign experts, a million Uyghurs have been detained in recent years in political re-education camps. Beijing denies this figure and claims that they are vocational training centers intended to keep people away from the temptation of Islamism, terrorism and separatism after a series of attacks attributed to Uyghurs.
More and more committed footballers
For a long time, sportsmen, and in particular footballers, have refrained from taking a stand, with a few notable exceptions, such as the Ivorian Didier Drogba or the French Lilian Thuram.
Antoine Griezmann’s decision comes at a time when French athletes are increasingly involved in societal debates, like their American colleagues, who were driving forces in the Black Lives Matter movement.
After the publication of a video showing police officers beating up a black man in Paris, Antoine Griezmann wrote a noticeable tweet two weeks ago, “I have pain in my France”. Other big names in French sport had followed suit, such as Kylian Mbappé, who had denounced “violent inadmissible”, or basketball players Rudy Gobert and Evan Fournier.
Tuesday evening, in the Champions League, the players of the Turkish clubs of Basaksehir and French of Paris Saint-Germain left the lawn of the Parc des Princes after hearing the referee-delegate designate as “the black” a member of the management Istanbul. The next day, when the meeting resumed, they wore anti-racism T-shirts.
In May 2019, in a context of controversy over persistent homophobia in stadiums in France, Antoine Griezmann had made the cover of LGBT + Têtu magazine: “Homophobia is not an opinion, but a crime. And, now, if a player makes homophobic remarks on the field, I think I will stop the match. Because things have to change, “he said in a long interview.
“We are witnessing something new, very unique”, judged Wednesday in an interview with AFP the sports historian Claude Boli, brother of former players Basile and Roger Boli, insisting on the role of social networks in this growing presence of athletes in the debate.
With AFP
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