On the occasion of the UN Universal Periodic Review on China on Tuesday (January 23, 2024), the Society for Threatened Peoples will hold a side event focusing on the situation in Tibet. “Since the last UPR in 2018, the Chinese government stepped up its repressive measures in Tibet. Meanwhile, four out of five Tibetan children have been forcibly placed in state boarding schools, where they only learn Mandarin. There are ongoing arrests of nuns and monks, and China is not granting independent UN experts access to Tibet,” stated Hanno Schedler, STP expert on genocide prevention.

In the course of the STP’s side event in Geneva, a group of Tibetans will give account on China’s repressive measures. “Just like in Xinjiang / East Turkestan, and Inner Mongolia, the Chinese government is doing everything it can to destroy the identity of the Tibetan people. The Chinese delegation’s task in Geneva tomorrow will be to obfuscate the persecution and oppression of minority groups and the overall catastrophic human rights situation in the country. Thus, Germany and like-minded states should demand China to put an end to the persecution of human rights advocates, the atrocities against the Tibetan people, the Uyghurs, and the Mongols, to the destruction of Mosques of the Muslim Hui people, and the persecution of members of the meditation movement Falun Gong. Also, it would be important to address the systematic persecution of the civil society in Hong Kong. Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, should give up his restraint, speak about the crimes of the Chinese government in detail, and demand an end to them,” Schedler stated. 

The STP’s side event will take place from 3:30 pm to 5 pm, Room XXVI, Palais des Nations.

Further, the STP criticized that China did not even implement recommendations from the previous UPR process which the country had already accepted. Thus, China did not ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), despite accepting an according recommendation. Also, the Chinese civil society is not allowed to take part in the preparation of the national report and in international mechanisms. China must be held accountable for the violations of women’s and children’s rights, for the use of abusive surveillance technology, and for using AI technology against his own population. The government in Beijing even rejected the Xinjiang Report of the UN High Commissioner, which stated that the human rights violations in the region “could amount to crimes against humanity” – despite the fact that, since 2017, more than one million people were imprisoned and indoctrinated in so-called re-education camps and hundreds of thousands were sentenced to long prison sentences. People are also subjected to forced labor outside the camps. 

Contact

Hanno Schedler, expert on genocide prevention and the Responsibility, in Geneva: +49 176 1001 64 98

Jasna Causevic: +49 551 499 06 16