Thematic Reports

Is there anything new that can be said about the disappearing nomads of Tibet? For years they have been removed from the plateau pastures that purify the great rivers of Asia, to be rehoused in concrete barracks, without their animals or livelihood. This is usually reported as coercion by a state determined to end nomadism. That has become a standard narrative. The alternative narrative, generated by China’s official media, is that the nomads are all voluntary ‘ecological migrants’ giving up their lands for the greater good of the planet, to allow degrading lands to become a wilderness of pristine grassland, …

On 4 March 2015 the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) released a special report on the right to health, entitled In the Shadow of Development: Maternal and Child Health in Crisis in Tibet. The report documents how a failing system of public healthcare has permitted extremely poor maternal and child health to persist in Tibet, despite drastic improvements in conditions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The report reveals that rural-living Tibetan women and children bear some of the highest risks in the PRC for birth-related illness and death, and finds that maternal and child health in Tibet is the worst in the …

Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) proclaims that ‘all are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of law.’ Although the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has signed many UN treaties and conventions, it has consistently failed to implement and abide by them, and has resorted to its domestic laws and regulations to violate the basic and legitimate rights of its citizens. As a member of the United Nations, the PRC is under legal obligation to educate its citizens, and implement within its territorial boundary, the laws, …