61st Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights- An Update
Geneva, Switzerland 1 April 2005: The 61st Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, which is underway at its headquarters in Geneva, has witnessed interruption of a Tibetan delegation’s speech by Chinese delegation. Ms Tsering Y Jampa of the International Campaign for Tibet, Amsterdam, was speaking yesterday about the violation of human rights in Tibet by the Chinese authorities when a Chinese delegation raised a point of order by requesting the Chairperson to halt. The Chinese delegation shouted, “Tibet is not independent and is an inalienable part of China.”
Mr. Kalsang Phuntsok, President of Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), Mrs. B. Tsering, President of theTibetan Women’s Association (TWA), Mrs. Norzin Dolma from Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) and Ms Tsering Y. Jampa from ICT-Holland attend the ongoing 61st Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights. In addition to meetings with various delegates – Governmental and Civil society – they are scheduled to make oral statements during the current session.
Chaired by Ravi Nair, Executive Director, South Asia Rights Documentation Centre, India, a parallel briefing on China was held within the UN Premises. The four panelists included Ms. Norzin Dolma and Sharon Hom from Human Rights in China (USA). Ms. Norzin Dilma deplored the Chinese continued “policies that undermine the Tibetan identity through a biased representation of Tibetan history, a denial of their culture and traditions, and the relegation of Tibetan as a second-rate language.”
Dolma further said, “With the pre-dominant use of the Chinese language in administration and commerce, the Tibetan language has been sidelined. Tibetan students are taught Chinese language and China’s version of Tibet’s history in schools.”
Quoting Mr. Teng Xing, an anthropologist at Beijing’s Institute of Ethnic Education Studies Dolma said, “In 10 to 20 years, minority languages in China will become languages only found in museums. This is the reality.”
Mrs Dolma explained that in the last ten years of “patriotic education” [1996 onwards] there were about 11,383 known expulsions of clergies from the religious institutions.
Since the early ‘80s well over 7,000 children have risked everything to journey across the Himalayas in the hope that they will receive in exile the kind of education that they have been denied back home. Between January and August 2004, 2,416 new refugees have reached the Tibetan Reception Centre in Dharamsala. Of these refugees 81.93 % were below the age of 25.
She urged the UN Commission to call upon the People’s Republic of China to respect Tibetan culture, history and traditions and refrain from policies that have the purpose or effect of assimilating the Tibetans into the dominant culture.
Mr. Tenzin S. Kayta of the Office of Tibet, Geneva said in his statement, “In 1999, China launched the Western Development Strategy comprising key projects including construction of the Qinghai-Tibet railway; as a model of development that will help to overcome Tibet’s “backwardness”.
Mr. Tenzin S. Kayta said that all these issues point to the fact that the Chinese government still has a long way to go in addressing its obligations with regards to economic, social and cultural rights.
Ms. Tsering Jampa also delivered a statement today in which she drew the attention of the UN Commission on Human Rights to the effects of the transmigration of Chinese people to Tibetan areas.
She said, “It is now estimated that the Chinese presently outnumber the Tibetans. In 2002, a senior Chinese official, Jin Shixun, vice president of the Commission for Planning and Development admitted that half of the 200,000 inhabitants in Lhasa, are Chinese”.
Report courtesy-Oot, Geneva