The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) welcomes the 75th session of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Today, the experts examine the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th state report of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

While the TCHRD expresses its full faith in the CERD experts, the Centre is disappointed at the selective censorship of non governmental organisation reports by the Secretariat of the CERD serviced by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). TCHRD's alternate report to the CERD was subjected to conditions to be made public on the official web page of the CERD. The Secretariat demanded the removal of 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 uprising by the Tibetan people in spring 2008 in the so-called “Tibet Autonomous Region” and other Tibetan areas under the present day China clearly revealed that systematic and institutional discrimination is one of the biggest factors behind the uprising. China’s occupation of Tibet is at the root cause of the systematic violations of human rights currently taking place in Tibet.

The TCHRD's report focuses on the denial of the following rights on the basis of the racial distinction of Tibetan as a people and as a land; denial of Civil and Political Rights, Environment and Resource Exploitation, Forced Evictions and the survival of the Tibetan nomadic lifestyles and Discrimination in Education. It is interesting to note that while the Secretariat bars the TCHRD report, it ironically published a report by a Chinese government NGO, Research Centre for Ethnic Issues in China, on the official web page.

The TCHRD considers the directive by the CERD Secretariat as a regression of rights of the civil society groups including the TCHRD. The Centre maintains its position that Tibet is a land under foreign occupation and hence would not be able to comply with the directive. However, the Centre extends its full faith in the CERD experts competence and authority in a just examination of the state party report of the People's Republic of China.