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UN sub-committe censors Tibetan report

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The seal of the United Nations. The United Nations sub-committee Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has censored contents of a report submitted by a Tibetan group based in Dharamshala, India.Unknown

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has censored contents of a report submitted by a Tibetan group based in Dharamshala, India.

The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) said in a statement that CERD Secretariat carried out selective censorship of it’s report.

The Secretariat demanded the removal of the phrases “China’s occupation of Tibet”, which is mentioned six times in the report, and “cultural genocide” in the concluding paragraph.

TCHRD maintains that Tibet is a land under foreign occupation, and that the directive to remove the phrases is not acceptable to the organisation.

“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,” said the TCHRD statment.

“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 colonised land.”

The Committee has been in session since 3 August for the 75th session, and will meet until 28 August. CERD is serviced by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Experts of the committee is scheduled to examine the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th state report of China today.

TCHRD’s alternate report to the CERD was not made public on the official web site of CERD). However, CERD published a report submitted by a Chinese government organised NGO — Research Centre for Ethnic Issues in China — on the official web site.

The Tibetan group’s report focused on the denial of civil and political rights, environment and resource exploitation, forced evictions and the survival of the Tibetan nomadic lifestyles and discrimination in education, saying these rights were denied on basis of the racial distinction of Tibetan as a people.

According to the Tibetan group, the uprising by the Tibetan people in spring 2008 in the “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.

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