5 January 2009
Since 1997 the British and Chinese governments have held a twice-yearly Human Rights Dialogue. The Dialogue takes place alternately inBritain and China, with the last meeting held in Beijing in January 2008. The next round of the dialogue, postponed by China last year, takes place in London on January 12.
Next week’s Dialogue will be the first to take place since last year’s Tibetan Uprising and China’s ensuing brutal crackdown in Tibet. It will take place against a backdrop of a worsening human rights crisis in Tibet, which is effectively under martial law almost a year after peaceful protests swept across the Tibetan Plateau.
The Chinese Government has admitted that over 4,000 Tibetans were detained following last year’s Uprising. Free Tibet estimates that more than one thousand Tibetans remain in arbitrary detention, their whereabouts unaccounted for at serious risk of torture and other forms of degrading treatment. You can find more information on this in our December 2008 report 'The Tortured Truth'.
In November 2008 the UN Committee Against Torture issued a scathing indictment of China’s record on torture. The Committee stated it remained “deeply concerned” about widespread reports of the “use of torture and ill-treatment of suspects in police custody, especially to extract confessions….to be used in criminal proceedings”.
Against this backdrop, the Chinese government in November 2008 staged a press conference to signal that it was pulling out of six years of dialogue with envoys of the Dalai Lama, aimed at finding a negotiated solution to its decades-long occupation of Tibet.
In view of the worsening human rights situation in Tibet, Free Tibet considers it is imperative that the British government does not simply use the upcoming Dialogue to claim that it is making progress in pushing for greater human rights in China and Tibet. Instead, Free Tibet considers it essential that at next week’s Dialogue the British government:
- Publicly raises its objections to China’s human rights record in Tibet (previously the British government has stated it has raised concerns in private meetings with Chinese government officials but has rarely raised such objections in public).
- Measures actual progress in the UK-China Human Rights Dialogue against specific human rights benchmarks – after more than 10 years the simple fact the Dialogue takes place is not enough
- requests that British Embassy staff in Beijing have unfettered access to all parts of Tibet.
- demands that China immediately reopens a dialogue without preconditions with representatives of the Tibetan people.
Free Tibet is urging all its members and supporters in the UK to email or call their MP this week, asking him/her to contact the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and to raise their concern at the human rights situation in Tibet with him. Please ask your MP to tell the Foreign Secretary that the grave and worsening human rights situation in Tibet makes it vital that next week’s Dialogue is more than a cosmetic face-saving measure and that the British government must use the Dialogue to demand that China makes immediate and demonstrable improvements in its human rights record in Tibet.
You can find your MP and send him/her an email via the website www.writetothem.com. To find out your MP's name phone the House of Commons Information Office on 020 7219 4272
