24 Aug 2022 – The human rights charter, adopted today by the Gangwon 2024 Youth Olympic Games Organising Committee (YOGOC), outlines the ambition of the YOGOC, within its remit, to address salient human rights risks related to the operations of the Youth Olympic Games (YOG), in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Olympic Charter, throughout all phases of the YOG – from planning through to staging.

This includes conducting ongoing human rights due diligence in accordance with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). In addition, Gangwon 2024 has invited all its sponsors, licensees and other service and product providers to be aligned with these Principles.

The charter highlights key focus areas for the YOGOC – such as equality and non-discrimination, the rights of the child, the right to physical and mental health, decent work, and freedom of expression – and includes the commitment to establish a Human Rights Committee to ensure the charter is upheld. The Committee’s work will include developing a human rights action plan, based on a human rights impact assessment – which will detail the measures for preventing and remediating negative impacts.

Gangwon 2024 is the first YOGOC to set up a Human Rights Committee and adopt a dedicated human rights charter. This follows the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s progress in establishing its own Human Rights Strategic Framework, which is scheduled to be finalised by September 2022.

In line with Olympic Agenda 2020+5, the IOC Framework will cover and provide specific action plans for each of the IOC’s three different spheres of responsibility: the IOC as an organisation, as the owner of the Olympic Games and as the leader of the Olympic Movement.

The IOC is engaged in ongoing efforts to integrate human rights considerations – based on the recommendations produced in March 2020 by Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Rachel Davis, Vice-President and Co-Founder of Shift, the centre of expertise on the UNGPs – into its main operations. Key outcomes of this ongoing engagement have been the establishment of a Human Rights Unit in March 2021 and the release of the IOC Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations in November 2021.

The UNGPs will also be the standard of reference for the IOC Human Rights Strategic Framework. They are already widely embraced by many stakeholders inside and outside the Olympic Movement, including sports governing bodies and Olympic Partners. They consist of a set of principles for the management of human rights. The IOC already references them in Olympic Host Contracts, the IOC Supplier Code and contractual agreements with commercial partners.