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Informative article from Wall Street Journal og AP. (6 maj)

Good advices from TheColorOrange about wearing the color orange during the Olympics 2008

IOC’s restrictions (May 5^th 2008) about ways of expressing.

Press release, 8 May 2008

IOC tightens the reins ahead of OG2008

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is trying to avoid political manifestations in Beijing. But IOC risks to be checkmated by the ColorOrange campaign.

TheColorOrange has tracked down a letter from IOC in which they’re tightening the dress code and other rules for expression during the OG to prevent critical statements about China in Beijing 2008. What they can’t prevent is athletes and other people using the Color Orange as a symbol of criticism of China’s violations of the human rights.        

Even a French enquiry about wearing a small badge with the text “For a better world” has been rejected. This indicates that on the whole, it will be impossible to bring in any kind of protest into the stadium.

The originators of TheColorOrange have published the new restrictions from IOC on their website, and at the same time they have sent out some good advice for athletes, journalists, politicians and spectators, about how to evade these rules by using orange.

TheColorOrange writes among other things: ” It’s not forbidden to use something orange. But you’ll risk, it could be forbidden and cause troubles, if you say, that you’re using the orange color to highlight the human rights violations in China, or that you support the campaign TheColorOrange. Therefore if you’re using something orange, for example an orange hat, or peel an orange at a press conference, then if someone asks you, why you’re using orange, you’ll have to say, while smiling large or just little, : “Orange is a lovely color, and it fits me fine”, or the like of banal sayings:)

This advice has been given on the assumption that you’re not “a highly profiled politician or the like, who will be inviolable in those connections even wearing something orange”, says TheColorOrange.net

”Neither IOC nor the Chinese authorities have a chance to prevent the use of the color orange for criticism of China. Otherwise they’d have to make an absurd decision about banning everything orange”, says the artist behind the project, Jens Galschiot (DK), smiling and adds that this would imply that the Dutch athletes would have to be excluded, because orange is exactly their color.  

As a cunning trick the OG participants are requested to preferably using orange products from approved companies for example Nike, who is main sponsor by OG and has a lot of orange clothes and accessories.

” TheColorOrange is meant to be used as a sort of common symbol for all China critics such as the Chinese democracy movements, Falun Gong, Amnesty International, the Darfur and Tibet committees, and others who want China to respect the basic human rights”, TheColorOrange writes on their website.

Orange activists have used the Color Orange in Greece during the lightning of the Olympic Torch, and in Hong Kong where Jens Galschiot and his Orange team were denied entry 26^th April as an attempt to stop an orange painting of The Pillar of Shame, an 8 meter’s high sculpture, which in Hong Kong is a symbol of the Tiananmen massacre. A useless expulsion, as the Chinese Democracy Movement, which co-operated in launching the TheColorOrange campaign, painted the sculpture orange, now just with even more media coverage. And so they stated the fact that the TheColorOrange project is impossible to stop in practice.

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More information, photos, videos about the Orange activities: http://www.TheColorOrange.net

Contact to TheColorOrange in Denmark:

Jens Galschiot, Banevaenget 22, DK-5270 Odense N, tel. +45 6618 4058, evening +45 6614 4038

mobile +45 4044 7058, E-mail: contact@TheColorOrange.net, www.TheColorOrange.net

Contact to the IOC: http://www.olympic.org

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