From Non-discrimination to the Guiding Principles and Back: How the Olympics Have Adressed Human Rights until Today, in Ziegler Andreas, Damiano Canapa, and Maria Izabel Cardozo (Eds.)

Whereas hr in football has come under intense scrutiny before the 2022 football World Cup in Qatar, few analyses have focused entirely on the Olympic Games, even though the century-long history of the world's largest multi-sports event illustrates the gradual convergence of the Olympic and hr's ideals and their reciprocal influences (the main exception is Talbot 2022).The present paper helps fill this gap in the literature by examining the Olympic Games' relationship with hr, which have long haunted the Olympic ideal.Indeed, the goal of the Olympic Games, as defined by the Olympic Charter -the "basic instrument of a constitutional nature" for the Olympic system -is to "place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity."2As this paper shows, the Olympic Games' relationship with hr parallels the evolution of international hr law and of society's conception of hr and the ways they are respected and promoted.Drawing on previous research by historians and other scholars, and on documents produced by the International Olympic Committee (ioc), intergovernmental organisations (UN, ilo, unesco, oecd, Council of Europe, etc.) and specialists in international law, four key periods are identified in the Olympic Games' evolving relationship with hr.Despite the difficulty of establishing a comprehensive definition of what hr entail, the need to respect hr has gained