Human Rights in China (www.hrichina.org) submitted a parallel NGO report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which identified serious challenges faced by China’s rural ethnic groups, including Tibetans.
Specifically, HRIC urges the Committee to press China to:
- Provide meaningful statistics to shed light on arrests, detention, and sentencing related to civil protests in China’s ethnic regions, as well as disaggregated figures on the proportionate share of costs and benefits of economic development in those regions;
- Provide more comprehensive information on the enjoyment of economic, social, and cultural rights by rural inhabitants, including rural-to-urban migrants, and the measures taken to ensure that rural inhabitants have equal enjoyment of these rights; and
- At a minimum, adopt a definition of racial discrimination in conformance with international law that clearly prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin, as set forth under the Convention itself.