South Africa was banned for Apartheid.

Afghanistan was kicked out for the policies of the Taliban.

Now, a human rights group is calling upon on the International Olympic Committe to expel Iraq from participation in the Games based on allegations that athletes have been tortured on the orders of Uday Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq's Olympic committee and son of the nation's leader.

Indict, a London-based human rights group, claims that soccer players and other athletes have been imprisoned and punished for, among other reasons, losing games. The group contends the IOC should take action because the alleged acts violate the organization's code of ethics.

Richard Pound, a longtime IOC member from Canada who recently served on the IOC's executive board, told ESPN.com that the IOC has the ability to take action against Iraq if it believes there is substance to the allegations.

"If there is a credible complaint to the IOC," Pound said, "it raises the question of, 'Can you have a (national Olympic committee) headed up by someone like this?' "

Pound declined to comment Thursday on whether he supported Indict's call for the expulsion of Iraq, saying he had not read Indict's complaint. The organization included statements from former Iraqi athletes now in exile.

Anita DeFrantz, an IOC member from the United States, also was cautious in giving her opinion when asked last month whether the IOC should take action against Iraq if athletes have been tortured. "That's a hypothetical," she said. "I don't answer hypotheticals."

FIFA, the governing body for international soccer, sent a two-person team to Baghdad in 1997 to investigate reports that some players were imprisoned and caned on the soles of their feet after Iraq was knocked out of the World Cup qualifying round by losing 3-1 to Kazakhstan. The investigators, soccer officials from Qatar and Malayasia, said they were unable to find evidence that players were harmed.

The FIFA investigators interviewed officials of the Iraqi Football Association and a dozen players, who were also physically examined. All of the athletes denied they were tortured.

"They weren't able to find any evidence or any witness to confirm those allegations,'' FIFA spokesman Andreas Herren said.

But, he added, "We were quite conscious of the fact that our investigative resources were very limited. We are a non-governmental organization and there are limits to what we could achieve.''

FIFA has not investigated any other alleged incidents of torture or punishment, a spokesperson told ESPN.com.

Getting the IOC to take action against any country is difficult, said David Wallechinsky, an Olympic historian.

"Just about the only time the IOC has responded is with South Africa, and even that was only after a lot of the dragging and screaming," he said. "They only took action after other countries threatened to boycott (the Olympics)."

Afghanistan was banned from participating in the Olympics because of the Taliban's governmental policies, Pound said.

Pound said the IOC has no control over a country's choice of Olympic committee chief. In Uday's case, his father appointed him to the position around 1985. Even if the IOC banned Iraq from future Olympic competition, it cannot remove Uday as head of its Olympic delegation.

Wallechinsky said he is uncertain how the new head of the IOC, Jacques Rogge, will react to the claims of abuse in Iraq. Rogge replaced longtime chief Juan Antonio Samaranch, who once gave an Olympic medal of honor to former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu for bringing the Romanians to the Los Angeles Summer Games in 1984. Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in 1989.

"We're all hoping that Rogge will be more proactive with dealing issues of human rights than Samaranch was," Wallechinsky said.

Tom Farrey is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at tom.farrey@espn3.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report