Keep the Box Empty: 15 dictators, one Olympic photo op, and a way to send them away

Every Olympic opening ceremony has a box where heads of state sit and smile for the cameras. Today the Human Rights Foundation and the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice asked the International Olympic Committee to leave 15 of those seats empty in Tokyo, and Buena built the site that lets anyone send those 15 dictators somewhere more fitting instead.¹²

Dictators love an opening ceremony

The Olympics are the biggest stage in sport, and authoritarian rulers have always known it. The 1936 Berlin Games polished the image of the Nazi regime. Russia hosted the Winter Games in Sochi in February 2014, then seized Crimea within weeks of the closing ceremony.

The box seat is where that polish happens. A dictator waves from the stands next to elected presidents and prime ministers, and the photo travels around the world. Back home, the activists, journalists and athletes who asked for their rights stay in prison, out of frame.

Past protests usually targeted whole countries, through boycotts that cost athletes the Games they had trained their lives for. HRF and the Lantos Foundation wanted to aim at the leaders alone. Their target was the photo op.

A letter to Thomas Bach, and a list of 15

The two foundations wrote to IOC President Thomas Bach. They asked that the seating boxes of 15 authoritarian heads of state be left empty at the Tokyo opening ceremony on July 23, 2021, whether those leaders planned to attend in person or virtually.¹

The list runs from Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to Nicolás Maduro, Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Min Aung Hlaing. It was built from HRF’s classifications of political regimes, the countries sending the most athletes to the Games, and records on political rights and press freedom.²

The athletes are not the point, and the campaign says so plainly. “An ‘empty box’ harms only the dictators and their tender egos,” said Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation.¹

Pick a dictator. Pick where he goes instead.

A letter can be ignored. So the campaign needed the public to add the pressure, and to have fun doing it. Buena founder Doug Burnett has been HRF’s creative director since 2016, and in April we proposed the campaign and built the idea, the site and the social content around one simple game.

At emptyboxseat.org, you choose one of the 15. Each one is a painted portrait on top of a red map pin. Then you choose where he should go instead of his box seat, and the pin drops: into a Tokyo landfill, the Siberian snow, a prison cell, Hell, Michigan, a beach called Stinky Point, Failure Canyon, or the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Every drop comes with a post ready to share, in the same deadpan voice: dictators don’t belong at the Olympics, here is where I sent mine, #KeepTheBoxEmpty. Underneath every path sits the petition asking the IOC to disinvite all 15.²

• Choose a dictator

  Fifteen heads of state, each painted onto a map pin.

• Choose where he goes

  A landfill, Siberia, a cell, Hell, or The Hague.

• Share it

  A ready-made post with #KeepTheBoxEmpty, and the petition one tap away.

Funny on purpose

Human rights campaigns often ask people to look at something painful. This one asked them to laugh at the powerful, and dictators are famously bad at being laughed at. A map pin with Putin’s face, planted in a snowfield, is a picture people want to post. A petition alone is not.

The design kept the joke tight. Bright pink type on pale blue, painted faces, and real map labels underneath, so every destination reads like a place you could look up. Which, in the case of Hell, Michigan, you can.

Dictators don’t belong at the Olympics.

From Tokyo to Beijing

The campaign went out on May 26 through HRF and the Lantos Foundation’s own channels, and the story was picked up as far away as Chile, where the coverage listed all 15 leaders by name.³ In June, New Hampshire’s Valley News profiled Lantos Swett, the campaign’s co-sponsor, and her worries about the next Games in China.⁵

That next Games is where the empty box went next. In January 2022, HRF and the Lantos Foundation carried the same idea to the Beijing Winter Olympics and turned it around: this time they asked democratic governments to leave their own box seats empty, joining the diplomatic boycott the United States had announced in December.⁴

An empty seat is a simple picture. It needs no stadium access, no ad budget and no permission. That is why it outlived its first deadline, and why a seat with nobody in it, right where a dictator wanted to be seen, still says more than a speech.