3 April, Geneva - In this update on the 56th UN Commission on Human Rights, we publish two written statements on Tibet submitted by NGOs which has been released as official documents of this year's session. Written statements by NGOs are required to be submitted to the Commission before the due date of 31 December, 1999.

UNITEDNATIONS
Economic and Social Council
Distr.GENERALE/CN.4/2000/NGO/5
23 February 2000
Original: ENGLISH

COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS
Fifty-sixth session
Item 16 of the provisional agenda

REPORT OF THE SUB-COMMISSION ON THE PROMOTION AND PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Written statement submitted by the International League for Human Rights, a non-governmental organization in special consultative status

The Secretary-General has received the following written statement which is circulated in accordance with Economic and Social Council resolution 1996/31.

[1 January 2000]

Question of population transfer

1. This Commission, through its Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, has paid continuing attention to the problems of forced population transfer, as evidenced by the Sub-Commissionís resolution 1998/27, calling for further study in light of the preliminary (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1993/17 and Corr.1) and final (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1997/23) reports of the Special Rapporteur on population transfer. These reports recognize that population transfers, including the implantation of settlers, affect the basic human rights of inhabitants and settlers. We would like to comment here on the human rights problems created by the large-scale but incremental implantation of Chinese settlers into Tibet and urge the Commission to give priority in its own agenda to problems of population transfer.

2. The Special Rapporteurís final report defines unlawful population transfer as "a practice or policy that has the purpose or effect of moving persons into or out of an area, whether within or across an international border, or into or out of an occupied territory, without the free and informed consent of the transferred population or any receiving population" (para. 66). The suffering of those driven out and the instability and continued conflict created by the transplantation of occupying settlers are obvious.

3. The final report notes further that population transfer, including the implantation of settlers, is unlawful even when "subtle and incremental" and even when carried on under the guise of economic development. Such is the case in Tibet. Since 1950, China has maintained a practice and policy of moving Chinese settlers into Tibet despite the opposition of Tibetans. Unfortunately, the transfer of millions of Chinese into Tibet has resulted in grave human rights violations for the Tibetan people.

4. The most recent and alarming instance of an attempt to transfer settlers into Tibet is the proposed China Western Poverty Reduction Project in Qinghai Province (north-eastern Tibet), which China proposes to fund with a World Bank loan. The oases and mineral reserves of Qaidam Basin in Qinghai Province have long been particularly attractive to Chinese policy makers and settlers. In April 1999, the World Bank revealed that it intended to fund the China Western Poverty Reduction Project, which included the resettlement of about 60,000 Chinese into Amdo Province of Tibet (now incorporated into Qinghai Province). Although proposed as a "poverty reduction project", plans show that the resettlement would have the effect of putting in place more human labour and infrastructure to support the exploitation of mineral resources in the area. Tibetans in the area have objected to the resettlement and substantial opposition has been raised to the project on human rights and environmental grounds.

5. The large-scale population transfer project would be funded by $160 million from the World Bank and the International Development Association. On 24 June, the World Bank approved the project, but suspended funding for the resettlement component pending a decision on whether to initiate an independent investigation. On 2 September 1999, the World Bank announced that an Inspection Panel would carry out an investigation into the project, including whether the World Bank failed to follow its own internal procedures in considering funding for the project without an appropriate environmental review and without properly consulting the people in the area where the resettlement would occur. The Inspection Panel has visited the area but has not yet issued its report.

6. In fact, Tibetans from Tulan County (the area into which the 60,000 Chinese would be resettled) sent two statements to the West appealing for support in efforts to halt World Bank funding of the China Western Poverty Reduction Project. According to one letter signed by the "Tibetan citizens of Tulan", by moving Chinese and Chinese Muslims into the area "the settlement is designed to create a dangerous situation in the region. Many of us will die in the conflicts and even if we survive, where do we go? . . . We have no alternative but to defend our land. . . ." The other letter says that the project "is very dangerous to us, an evidence of the Chinese policy of ethnic cleansing of the Tibetan people . . . In the event the resettlement project is carried out with the World Bank financing, then the World Bank will have participated in passing a death sentence on us here."

7. The World Bank project is just one instance of a long-standing policy of the Government of China to resettle Chinese in Tibet. In 1994, the Government publicly acknowledged that it encourages and supports migration into Tibet. Recent statements by government leaders and in official Chinese publications have acknowledged government policies and programmes to encourage Chinese migration to Tibet. The 1997 Plan for the Tibet Autonomous Region focuses on attracting "private entrepreneurs from outside Tibet" as a principal means to expand the economy. Consequently, Chinese authorities in November 1997 announced additional economic incentives for Tibet and other "ethnic" regions. These were to provide low-interest loans, tax breaks and subsidies over the next three years, primarily for manufacturing firms. In August 1998, according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, the Chinese authorities announced the completion of 60 key development projects in Tibet, among 62 projects that had been planned by the Communist Party Central Committee in Beijing without the participation of Tibetans. These projects, while intended to enhance living standards, were also intended "to enhance foreign investment" in Tibet. They are part of an overarching policy of building infrastructure and investment incentives to draw more Chinese settlers (alone or in partnership with other non-Tibetans) into Tibet.

8. In December 1998, the Tibet Information Network reported on renewed plans to attempt to link China with Tibet through a railway line from Qinghai Province. The report noted that even Chinese economists acknowledge that the railway cannot be justified on economic terms alone, but is intended to help bring Tibet under greater political control, in part by facilitating a greater influx of both troops and settlers into Tibet.

9. The great weight of independent legal opinion has concluded that Tibet was independent when China invaded in 1949/50 and is now an illegally occupied territory. Population transfer, when it involves resettlement into occupied territory, violates article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which China has ratified. Even if Tibet were not illegally occupied, the resettlement of Chinese into Tibet violates Tibetansí human rights. The right to self-determination provides that "All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development."

10. The Tibetans are a people with a distinct language, culture, religion and history and are thus possessed of a right to self-determination provided under international law. The Sub-Commissionís Special Rapporteur on population transfer has observed more specifically that a people with a right of self-determination have a right to control their economic, cultural and political destiny free of domination by implanted settlers.

11. The population transfer into Tibet that has already taken place, with its accompanying violations of civil and political rights, restrictive childbearing practices, threats to the physical health of Tibetans, discrimination and economic and physical dislocation, overburdens the fragile environment and the exploitation of resources. The population transfer is not just infringing on the Tibetansí human rights, it is threatening the very survival of the Tibetan people and culture. We therefore call upon the Commission to move forward the work of the Sub-Commission and the Special Rapporteur on population transfer by recognizing and condemning particular practices of implanting settlers, such as is being carried out in Tibet, which do cause severe human rights violations.

----- UNITEDNATIONS Economic and SocialCouncil Distr.GENERALE/CN.4/2000/NGO/5 13 February 2000 Original: ENGLISH

COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS
Fifty-sixth session
Item 5 of the provisional agenda

THE RIGHT OF PEOPLES TO SELF-DETERMINATION AND ITS APPLICATION TO PEOPLES UNDER COLONIAL OR ALIEN DOMINATION OR FOREIGN OCCUPATION

Written statement submitted by the International League for Human Rights, a non-governmental organization in special consultative status

The Secretary-General has received the following written statement which is circulated in accordance with Economic and Social Council resolution 1996/31.

[1 January 2000]

1. The year 1999 saw the issue of the right to self-determination reach the headlines of virtually every newspaper in the world through the events in Kosovo and East Timor. In Kosovo, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervened to prevent the Government of Yugoslavia from denying, through systematic ethnic cleansing, the right of the Kosovars to self-determination. In East Timor, the United Nations intervened to prevent militants from using violence to undermine the results of a peaceful referendum by the East Timorese exercising their right of self-determination, which the Government of Indonesia finally acknowledged after more than 20 years of colonial occupation.

2. In both cases, the failure to recognize a peopleís right to self-determination led to violent conflict. In both cases, the international community finally acted upon the realization that only through the exercise of the right of self-determination can long-term solutions be found to violent ethnic conflict and systematic human rights abuses. Tibet is another example where the international communityís attention to the Tibetan peopleís right to self-determination can bring an end to decades of political repression, cultural destruction and other human rights abuses against the Tibetan people. It can also prevent the possibility that years of ignoring the Tibetan peopleís non-violent campaign to win respect for their fundamental rights will create a level of frustration sufficient to trigger violence in Tibet.

3. Several international treaties and declarations, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, acknowledge the legal right of all peoples to "freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development". The United Nations General Assembly has twice recognized the Tibetan peopleís right to self-determination in its resolutions 1723 (XVI) (1961) and 2079 (XX) (1965). The Tibetans, with their distinct language, history and culture, are indisputably a "people" to whom the right of self-determination attaches.

4. The objection that the right of self-determination must give way to Chinaís claim of territorial integrity is misplaced for several reasons. First, the right of self-determination is the right to a choice of political status. It does not necessarily mean independence. Thus, the Tibetan people could reasonably decide to evolve an arrangement whereby the Tibetan people would obtain genuine self-rule within the boundaries of the Chinese State, preserving Chinaís territorial integrity while at the same time giving the Tibetan people the opportunity in fact to determine their economic, social and cultural development. Indeed, His Holiness the Dalai Lama has proposed just such an arrangement. Given the Tibetan peopleís legal right to self-determination, the failure of the international community to support actively the exercise of that right is both legally insupportable and morally unconscionable.

5. Second, while the right of self-determination is not absolute, neither is the right of territorial integrity. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopting language from the United Nations Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation Among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, acknowledges that the right of self-determination should not undermine "the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States conducting themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples and thus possessed of a Government representing the whole people belonging to the territory without distinction of any kind". As the International Commission of Jurists, among others, have pointed out, this language imposes a requirement of legitimacy on a State. A State that oppresses, destroys or exploits a people, and fails to promote and protect the fundamental human rights of the people without discrimination, ceases to be legitimate as to that people and cannot claim a right of territorial integrity as against the peopleís claim of self-determination.

6. The violation of human rights in Tibet by the Government of China started with the entry of armed troops into Tibet in 1949 and continues to the present. The abuse spans a broad spectrum of human rights which the Tibetans are entitled to enjoy, including such practices as: suppression of religion (such as the interference in the selection of the eleventh Panchen Lama, the banning of photographs of the Dalai Lama and periodic "re-education" campaigns in the monasteries and nunneries); population transfer (through the coerced transfer of cadres and encouragement of Chinese resettlement through subsidies, incentives and infrastructure projects); denial of reproductive rights (forced and coerced abortions and sterilizations); discrimination in employment, education and housing; suppression of the Tibetan language; destruction of the environment (through excessive logging, overgrazing and farming, and careless mining practices); enforced disappearances and incommunicado detention (the most notable example of which is the 10-year-old eleventh Panchen Lama, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima); denial of freedom of expression and wrongful arrest (through the detention of any Tibetan expressing any objection to Chinese rule or Chinese policies); torture (routinely used in detention centres and prisons against Tibetan political prisoners); and arbitrary execution (the killing by torture and abuse of Tibetan political prisoners, which is increasing in frequency).

7. Increasingly, the Government of China has acknowledged official policies which have had the purpose and/or the effect of denying Tibetans their fundamental human rights, for example in the areas of suppression of religion, population transfer (e.g. the World Bank-funded China Western Poverty Reduction Project), childbirth restrictions, discrimination in education, and denial of freedom of expression. The persistent denial of human rights in Tibet, then, is more than a case of mere governmental indifference to one of its "minority" populations. The human rights violations in Tibet evidence a governmental policy to deprive the Tibetan people of any ability to express a political identity and to eviscerate the social, cultural and economic ties which have bound the Tibetans together historically as a people.

8. The Government of China has therefore ceased to be the legitimate Government for the Tibetan people and cannot claim a right of territorial integrity as against the Tibetansí right to self-determination. The opportunity exists now, however, to resolve peacefully both the Tibetan claim to self-determination and the Chinese claim to territorial integrity. Within the framework of the Tibetansí non-violent campaign to secure protection for their fundamental human rights under the leadership of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the international community can act now to avoid the kind of violent conflict that has torn apart other regions of the world.

9. Tibet can be a model for the kind of non-violent conflict resolution which has eluded the international community in so many other places, largely because the international community failed to act with foresight before it was too late. We therefore urge the Commission to take the first step towards peaceful resolution of the terrible human rights situation in Tibet by resolving to support the Tibetansí fundamental human rights, specifically their right to self-determination.

[ Homepage ] [ 56th UN Commission on Human Rights ]



This site is maintained and updated by The Office of Tibet, the official agency of His Holiness His Holiness the Dalai Lama in London. This Web page may be linked to any other Web sites. Contents may not be altered.
Last updated: 6-April-2000