(TibetanReview.net, Jun08’24) —China is to take a delegation of EU officials on a rare field trip to Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), the western half of Tibet proper, later this month, betting on a hope that they will see, hear and believe nothing other than what its propaganda officials tell, show and assure them about the region. The expectation is that they will then paint a glowing picture of the situation there.
The occasion is the European Union officials’ outing to their annual human-rights dialogue with China, which will take place on Jun 16 in Chongqing, reported the scmp.com Jun 8, citing an EU spokeswoman.
Brussels is understood to have requested a field visit to the TAR to examine human-rights conditions there, having given Beijing the names of some prisons it hoped to see, the report said.
“As it stands now, a side visit to Tibet is also being organised by the Chinese authorities for a small group of officials from the European External Action Service who follow human rights issues,” Nabila Massrali, the bloc’s foreign-affairs spokeswoman, has said.
The report said the EU team will be led by Paola Pampaloni, the second-in-command on its Asia desk within the union’s diplomatic corps. She speaks Italian (mother tongue), English, French and Spanish; is trained in law, diplomacy and project management; and has held EU posts since 1993.
During the dialogue in Chongqing, Brussels is expected to raise the many concerns it has about human rights in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including hot-button issues in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
It is rare for a European delegation to be granted access to the secluded region and the only visits, whether for journalists or diplomats, ever allowed thus far by China have been chaperoned ones, leaving no room for any independent querying of the actual situation there.
The EU has expressed serious concern about the human rights situation in Tibet.
In a statement to mark World Human Rights Day late last year, the EU pointed to practices including “obligatory boarding schooling and DNA sampling” as “further indications of the dire human-rights situation” in Tibet.
“The EU continues to call for meaningful, unrestricted and unsupervised access by independent international experts, foreign journalists and diplomats to Tibet, Xinjiang and elsewhere in China,” the statement read.
In a report published last month, New York-based global advocacy group Human Rights Watch said the Chinese government since 2016 “has dramatically accelerated the relocation of rural villagers and herders in Tibet” against the will and to the detriment of the interests of affected Tibetan farmers and herders.
Beijing denies all charges of human-rights violations in Tibet while maintaining that any raising of the issue is political and giving support for separatism. It has long rejected allegations of curbing religious freedoms in the region, while also contending that Tibetan Buddhism should adapt to the Chinese context.
The report noted that human rights, often a thorny issue in the Sino-EU relationship, have slipped down the agenda in recent years, supplanted by geopolitical concerns over China’s relationship with Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The long-running exchange on human rights issues had been an annual fixture in the diplomatic calendar until a tit-for-tat sanctioning blitz put it on ice during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, 2021 and 2022. At 2022’s EU-China summit, a pledge was made to restart the talks.
The talks have been criticized by rights groups for not leading to any progress in Beijing’s human rights record and the lack of any benchmark for gauging their success.