Paris (AFP)

French footballer Antoine Griezmann announced on Thursday that he would “put an immediate end to (his) partnership” with Huawei, citing “strong suspicions” about the participation of the Chinese telecoms giant in the monitoring of the Uyghur Muslim minority by the Chinese authorities.

"Following strong suspicions that the Huawei company has contributed to the development of a + Uyghur alert + thanks to facial recognition software, I announce that I am putting an immediate end to my partnership linking me to this company", wrote the Barcelona striker and the France team, who had a contract with the brand since 2017.

The 2018 world champion calls on "Huawei not to just deny these accusations but to take concrete actions as quickly as possible to condemn this mass repression of" the Uyghur minority "and to use its influence to contribute to respect for human rights. Man and Woman in society ".

Asked by AFP, Huawei France had not reacted in the middle of the afternoon.

Chinese companies have been accused in the past of having implemented facial recognition software to identify people of Uyghur appearance.

Again on Tuesday, Huawei was singled out in the United States for being involved in testing such detection software, according to research firm IPVM.

An internal report from the Chinese group (removed from Huawei's website but still available on the internet) indicated that this facial recognition software was in the testing phase to provide "alerts to the presence of Uyghurs" and made it possible to recognize "age, sex, ethnicity".

The US-based human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Wednesday said in a report that Muslims were arrested in northwest China's Xinjiang region after being "reported. "by software that identifies suspicious behavior.

The Uyghurs are the main ethnic group in Xinjiang, a huge region in western China bordering mainly Afghanistan and Pakistan.

According to foreign experts, a million Uyghurs have been detained in recent years in political re-education camps.

Beijing denies this figure and claims that they are vocational training centers intended to keep people away from the temptation of Islamism, terrorism and separatism after a series of attacks attributed to Uyghurs.

For a long time, sportsmen, and in particular footballers, have been careful not to take a position, with a few notable exceptions such as the Ivorian Didier Drogba or the French Lilian Thuram.

- "Something new" -

This decision by Griezmann comes at a time when French athletes are increasingly intervening in societal debates, like their American colleagues who were the driving forces in the Black Lives Matter movement.

After the publication of a video showing the police beating a black man in Paris, Antoine Griezmann wrote a noticeable tweet two weeks ago, "I hurt my France".

Other big names in French sport, had followed suit, such as Kylian Mbappé who had denounced "violent inadmissible", or basketball players Rudy Gobert and Evan Fournier.

Tuesday evening, in the Champions League, the players of the Turkish clubs of Basaksehir and French of Paris SG had left the lawn of the Parc des Princes after hearing the referee-delegate designate as "the black" a member of the staff of Istanbul.

The next day, when the meeting resumed, they wore anti-racism T-shirts.

In May 2019, in a context of controversy over persistent homophobia in stadiums in France, Antoine Griezmann had made the cover of LGBT + Têtu magazine: "Homophobia is not an opinion, but a crime. And, now, if a player makes homophobic remarks on the field, I think I will stop the match. Because it has to change, "he said in a long interview.

"We are witnessing something new, very unique", judged Wednesday in an interview with AFP the sports historian Claude Boli, brother of former players Basile and Roger Boli, insisting on the role of social networks in this growing presence of athletes in the debate.

© 2020 AFP