Conference calls for continued Olympic ban against South Africa.

Conference calls for continued Olympic ban against South Africa

The Second International Conference on the Sports Boycott against South Africa has supported the position of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that South Africa should not be readmitted into the Olympic Movement until apartheid had been ended.

The support was voiced in the Paris Declaration on Apartheid Sport that was adopted on 18 May by acclamation by the three-day conference, held at UNESCO House in the French capital.

The Conference--organized by the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid in co-operation with the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa and the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), with the assistance of the Federation Sportive et Gymnique du Travail in France--was attended by 300 sportsmen and sportwomen, sports administrators, government representatives, national and international bodies, and national liberation movements of southern Africa.

The declaration appealed to sportsmen and women to refuse to tour South Africa until the apartheid system had been ended. It urged the IOC to adopt a code of conduct to discourage sports contacts with South Africa and to take the disciplinary powers necessary for it to deal effectively with any of its affiliates which transgressed against the international campaigh against apartheid sport.

The Conference stated that the international community had a special obligation to take every possible step to compel the International Rugby Board abandon its systematic support for South Africa. It strongly condemned the insistence of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union on touring South Africa in July, "regardless of cost and in defiance of domestic public opinion", and called for the tour's cancellation.

The declaration noted that sports coaches of American universities had begun to recruit sportsmen and women from South Africa to train and compete on scholarships in the United States. Those athletes were then used for political purposes in an attempt to undermine the international campaign against apartheid sport. The declaration appealed to university authorities to stop that support of apartheid sport. It noted that there was a heavy traffic of cricketers between South Africa and England in their respective off-seasons, and said that the International Cricket Conference must urgently develop a strategy which would effectively end "this most significant degree of sports contact".

The Conference...