Dharamsala, August 7 – The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy expressed its disappointment at the exclusion of the ‘alternative report’ it submitted a month ago from the 75th session of the United Nations Committee on the elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The Tibetan NGO based here blamed the Secretariat of the CERD staffed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) for “the selective censorship” of alternative reports submitted by non governmental organisations.
The CERD today examines the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th state report of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The TCHRD had sent its report in June 2009 but was not posted on its official website by the CERD which demanded that the Tibetan NGO remove the phrases “China’s occupation of Tibet”, which occurs six times in the report, and “cultural genocide” in the concluding paragraph.
“The Secretariat’s directive is unacceptable to the TCHRD as it deems that not only would it be a tremendous factual error but also acceptance of indirect diktats of the PRC. It is universally accepted that Tibet is a land under foreign occupation and it is also a universally accepted truth that discrimination is inherent in colonized land,” the TCHRD said in a statement today.
The TCHRD’s report says that the Tibetans, on the basis of the racial distinction as a people, are denied civil and political Rights, environment and resource exploitation and that they are subjected to forced evictions and discrimination in education, and the survival of the Tibetan nomadic lifestyles threatened.
Interestingly the CERD Secretariat has published a report by Research Centre for Ethnic Issues in China, a disguised NGO of the Chinese government, on the its official web page.
The TCHRD called the directive by the CERD Secretariat as a “regression of rights of the civil society groups including the TCHRD.”
While hoping that CERD experts will examine China’s state report with competence and authority the Tibetan NGO maintains that “Tibet is a land under foreign occupation and hence would not be able to comply with the directive” of CERD Secretariat.
TCHRD was earlier barred from the United Nations Review Conference on Racism (DRC) held in Geneva, Switzerland, from 20 -24 April 2009 despite its accreditation to the World Conference Against Racism (WCR) in Durban in 2001 when the General Assembly voted the Centre’s accreditation to the World Conference.
