Human rights

It is nothing new that the West discovers human rights when it suits them. Meanwhile, there is no scruple worth as much as a good contract in China, buying oil from Iran or Venezuela, celebrating a World Cup in Qatar, not to mention a holiday in Cuba. These are some sadly current examples of how the best defence is a good offence. The protagonist is the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, and his profound reflection on the lack of global coherence, especially on the part of Europeans who should apologise for everything they have done over the last 3,000 years. 

Infantino confessed his trauma as the son of Italians, an immigrant in Switzerland, discriminated against and insulted for not speaking German well. Each and every one of us must examine our conscience about our behaviour in relation to our principles and values, but it takes a lot of courage to accept the usual deviations and to correct the course with honesty and integrity. We can recognise that Gianni Infantino encountered this uncomfortable inheritance when he took office. The coherent thing to do, according to his yardstick, is to assume that nobody is perfect and that the most important thing is football, even if in order to hold it in Qatar, thanks to its enormous financial commitment, competitions have to be stopped in all countries to play in winter, to look the other way on the working conditions of those who have built the stadiums in subhuman conditions with hundreds of deaths and where the rights of women, homosexuals and immigrants leave much to be desired. Not to mention its support, at the suggestion of the United States, for the Muslim Brotherhood, considered terrorists in many countries. 

It is paradoxical and opportunistic or hypocritical, as Infantino says, that some footballers, artists and media have waited until now to become aware of what is really happening in Qatar. The World Cup to improve their image because when the ball rolls everyone will want their team to win and memory is weak. It has happened with Putin's gas and the invasion of Ukraine; the Chinese repression of dissidents, the killings in Iran to quell the protests started by women and now supported by a large part of Iranians throughout the country, the reconversion of the Chavist dictator Maduro because his oil is needed in the market or if we want a general context that concerns the coherence of each and every one of us, when we go on holiday to Cuba or to another country under dictatorship or authoritarian populism without much concern for the living conditions of its inhabitants. 

The sad reality of the modern world is that hardly anyone can give lessons.