Nobel Peace Prize winner Prof. Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner have called on each foreign delegation to the 1980 Moscow Olympics “to take particular responsibility for the fate of one, two or more Prisoners of Conscience in the USSR, “according to an appeal obtained by the International Monitoring Committee for the 1980 Olympics. The Committee consists of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, Union of Councils for Soviet Jews and four other activist groups in the U.S., Canada, England, France and Israel.
Sakharov stated that “violations of human rights in the USSR” have prompted a “campaign to boycott the 1980 Olympics. I share and deeply respect the motives of the initiators of this campaign.”
The prisoners that should be “adopted” by the Olympic teams, Sakharov said, include Anatoly Shcharansky, Yuri Orlov, Alexander Ginzburg, Vladimir Slepak, Ida Nudel and Edward Kuznetsov. “Require the Soviet authorities to free these particular people as a humanitarian act and a gesture of goodwill as a prerequisite for these sports delegations to consider it possible to participate in the Olympics and necessary for the implementation of the principles of the Olympic charter,” Sakharov said.
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