Empty Box Seat

The 1936 Berlin Games burnished the Nazi regime. Russia invaded Crimea right after hosting the 2014 Sochi Games. The Olympics are a premier stage for regimes that want to look normal.

Dictators are still invited into the stadium box at the opening ceremony. For every athlete on a podium, there is an activist in prison back home for asking for democracy, and the glamorous photos drown them out.

Past protests targeted whole countries, which punished athletes for their rulers' crimes. The Human Rights Foundation and the Lantos Foundation wanted to aim at the leaders themselves. Their target was the photo op.

HRF and the Lantos Foundation wrote to IOC president Thomas Bach. They asked him to leave the box seats of 15 dictators empty at the Tokyo opening ceremony, whether they planned to attend in person or virtually.

The list ran from Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to Nicolás Maduro, Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Min Aung Hlaing. It drew on HRF's regime classifications, the countries sending the most athletes, and records on political rights and press freedom.

There was no production budget and no media budget. The idea had to travel on its own, so the public could add the pressure a letter couldn't. The brief set a fast clock to match: concept, website and social launch in under three weeks.

At emptyboxseat.org you chose one of the 15, then chose where he should go instead of his box seat. His face, on a map pin, dropped into a Tokyo landfill, Siberia, a prison cell or Hell, Michigan.

Each result came with a post ready to copy: Dictators don't belong at the Olympics. I just sent Vladimir Putin from his box seat to a Tokyo Landfill instead. #KeepTheBoxEmpty.

For anyone in a hurry, the site also offered ready-made images to download and share. Underneath every path sat the petition asking the IOC to disinvite all 15, hosted on Change.org. Sharing came first; signing was one tap away.

The campaign launched in May 2021 and ran up to the Tokyo opening ceremony on July 23. HRF and the Lantos Foundation carried it through their own channels, and it was picked up as Keep The Box Empty.

In January 2022, the two foundations took the same idea to the Beijing Winter Games. They urged democratic governments to stage a diplomatic boycott and leave their own box seats empty, and the site was updated to match.

The empty box outlived its first deadline. A seat with nobody in it, where a dictator wanted to be seen, was simple enough to work for a second Olympics. It needed no stadium access and no ad budget, only a picture people wanted to share.