Chinese embassy in Berlin hit by protests on Olympic Eve

One day before the start of the Olympics in Beijing, over a hundred protestors gathered in front of the Chinese embassy in Berlin on Thursday to demonstrate for human rights.

The demonstration included members of China’s main ethnic minorities – Tibetans, Mongols and Uighurs – as well as adherents of the controversial religious movement Falun Gong. They demanded greater freedom of speech, press and religion in China and extinguished a symbolic Olympic torch.

Tilman Zülch, secretary general of the German human rights group the Society for Threatened Peoples, told news agency DDP that the Olympics in China were “comparable with the games from 1936 in Berlin,” when Nazi Germany hosted the sporting event.

“These aren’t the games of openness and friendship, but rather the games of repression,” he said, adding that China was a ruled by a totalitarian regime that committed human rights abuses.

A group of Tibet activists plan to hold a “protestival” at Berlin’s landmark Brandenburg Gate to call attention to the “ongoing bad human rights situation” the Chinese-controlled province.