Human Rights Watch Calls For Unconditional Release of Tibetan PrinterSaturday, 6 December 2008, 3:46 p.m.

Paljor Norbu

Dharamshala: Human
Rights Watch, the US-based advocacy group on human rights, has called
on the international community to protest the imprisonment and secret
sentencing of Paljor Norbu, an 81-year-old Tibetan traditional printer,
and seek his immediate exoneration and unconditional release.Norbu,
whose Chinese name is Panjue Ruobu, was taken by the police from his
home in Lhasa on October 31, 2008, on suspicion that he had printed
“prohibited material,” including the banned Tibetan flag, the Human
Rights Watch said in a release on Friday. During his
detention, judicial authorities refused to inform his relatives that he
was being detained, or to reveal the charges against him. He was tried in secret in November and sentenced to seven years in prison and his current whereabouts are unknown.“Just
about any material on Tibet that lacks the Chinese Communist Party’s
explicit blessing is ‘prohibited material,’” said Sophie Richardson,
Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “But no one should be
jailed for printing flags, books, or pictures just because a government
would prefer to suppress those ideas – that’s why freedom of expression
is a basic right.”Although the authorities have not made public
the details of the verdict, the nature of the initial accusations
leveled against Norbu and the length of the sentence suggest that he
was tried on charges of “inciting separatism” (article 103 of the
Criminal Law). This vaguely defined crime has been used
repeatedly to silence Tibetans resisting the tight and often arbitrary
limits imposed on their freedom of expression by Chinese law, the
rights group said.A descendant of a family with a long history
of printing and publishing Buddhist texts for monasteries, Norbu is an
internationally renowned master printer. He used both modern and
traditional woodblock printing techniques in his workshop, which
employed several dozen workers. In addition to religious texts, the
shop printed prayer flags, folk reproductions, books, leaflets, and
traditional literature.After Norbu’s arrest, the police closed
his shop, affixed notices of official closure on the door, and
prohibited employees from returning. The police also confiscated books
and woodblocks from the shop’s collection.“Instead of
persecuting Paljor Norbu, the Chinese government should prize his
contributions toward historical and cultural preservation,” said
Richardson. “The Chinese government will almost certainly say
that the charges brought against Paljor Norbu were ‘in accordance with
the law,’” said Richardson. “But, by definition, those laws restrict
free speech, and until the government brings its laws into conformity
with international human rights norms, we will continue to see peaceful
critics like Norbu incarcerated for alleged ‘separatism.’”