28 February 2025

Dear Honorable G7 Foreign Ministers: 

Hon Mélanie Joly, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Canada; Mr Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister of Foreign Affairs, France; Hon. Annalena Baerbock, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany; Mr Antonio Tajani, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Italy; His Excellency Takeshi Iwaya, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Japan; Hon David Lammy, Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs, UK; Hon Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, United States of America;  Hon. Kaja Kallas, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy & Vice-President of the European Commission

Re: Urgent action against China’s crackdown in Tibet

We, a coalition of over 142 Tibet-related rights groups, are writing to you ahead of the G7 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Canada on 12-14 March 2025, urging you to take firm joint action concerning China’s relentless crackdown on Tibet [1] and attempts to eradicate Tibetans’ distinct identity. 

In October 2024 we saw 15 UN member states, including six G7 countries, deliver a joint statement at the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee expressing serious concern about “credible reports detailing human rights abuses in Tibet” and stress that China has had multiple opportunities to meaningfully address the widespread concerns about human rights in Tibet but it has systematically failed to do so. 

Occupied for over seven decades, China’s rule in Tibet is one of the last remnants of 20th-century colonialism, and G7 countries must take a stand. In February 2025, Freedom House gave Tibet a global freedom score of zero out of a hundred; scoring lower than North Korea, Sudan and the Gaza Strip. This is an explicit charge of the worsening situation in occupied Tibet under China’s failed policies and another clear sign that global leaders must take stronger action.  

The occupation of Tibet is epitomised by a vast and alarming system of colonial-style residential boarding schools, in which approximately one million Tibetan children are forcibly separated from their families, placed into state-run facilities where they are made to speak and study in Chinese and subjected to intense political indoctrination.

By intentionally uprooting Tibetan children from their families and culture, and placing them in state-run boarding schools, the Chinese authorities are using one of the most heinous tools of colonisation to attack Tibetan identity. While China claims to be educating Tibetan children, the world knows what it looks like when children are pushed into boarding schools run by a state that wants to wipe out their culture, including high levels of alienation, loss of identity, and intergenerational trauma.

In the last two years, multiple UN human rights bodies have raised the alarm at the escalation of human rights violations in Tibet, including the colonial boarding school system; an extensive labour transfer programme; the relocation of millions of rural Tibetans from their lands; the imprisonment of Tibetan environmental defenders; and increased restrictions on the provision of Tibetan-language education. Tibetans who criticise or protest these policies or even peacefully express their Tibetan identity continue to face arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture, and death in custody at the hands of the Chinese state. 

China’s interference in Tibet’s freedom of religion is also a call for much concern. The Chinese government imposes tight controls on Tibetan Buddhism, and monks and nuns who try to observe their faith outside of these narrow confines face extreme repression. The Chinese government’s control of freedom of religion extends to matters of reincarnation, with the CCP asserting that the Party, rather than Tibetan Buddhists themselves, will determine the identity of the next Dalai Lama. Meanwhile, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the Panchen Lama remains missing with no news of his health or location. This May will mark 30 years since he was abducted as a six-year-old, making him the world’s youngest political prisoner at the time.

China’s development plans across the Tibetan plateau pose wide-scale and significant threats to the fragile environment, threatening essential biodiversity, and creating severe water security issues as well as displacing local population through “environmental or ecological migration”.  Tibetans have no say in whether these projects take place, and those who report or challenge them are arbitrarily detained and imprisoned, such as Tsongon Tsering, sentenced to prison in 2024 for reporting illegal mining. He is just one of the many Tibetan environmental defenders who have been targeted by Chinese authorities for exposing China’s exploitation of Tibet and its environment. 

Furthermore, the Chinese government is currently making a concerted effort to press for Tibet to be renamed ‘Xizang’, a Chinese term (meaning “the western treasure house”) that is widely rejected by Tibetans. UN experts recently stated that the escalation of Beijing’s policies of sinicization are contributing to the “assimilation and erosion of their [Tibetan] identity”.

Despite the welcome and mounting pressure from G7 governments concerning Tibet, China’s response has been consistent: deny, deflect, and reject. Given all the evidence and knowledge about China’s flagrant disregard and systematic failure to meaningfully address the abuses in Tibet the situation now warrants more than just a mention in the G7 Foreign Ministers statement. We therefore call on you  to openly address the attack on Tibet with a robust joint statement of concern and:  

1. Echo the UN human rights experts’ recommendations and call on China to immediately abolish the coercive colonial boarding schools for Tibetan children and call on the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to address the increased repression in Tibet, including raising concern about the residential boarding schools.
2. Call for meaningful and unfettered access to Tibet for independent UN human rights monitors – no meaningful visit has been allowed in over 20 years. [2]
3. Call for an end to China’s interference in the selection and installation of Tibetan Buddhist leaders, including any future reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, which must be determined solely by the Tibetan people, following international human rights law. 
4. Call for the release of all Tibetan political prisoners, including Tsongon Tsering, Jampa Choephel, and Anya Sengdra, and urgently clarify the whereabouts of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and his missing family members. 
5. Press China to immediately stop all megadevelopment projects in occupied Tibet until Tibetans are given the right to free, prior, and informed consent to decide upon the future of projects.

Together your governments are uniquely positioned to exercise strong and direct influence on China’s leadership and we call on you to take this key multilateral opportunity to address the existential threats to Tibetans’ identity and culture.

Signed

NOTES:

1. GEOGRAPHICAL NOTE: ‘Tibet’ refers to the three Tibetan provinces of Amdo, Kham and U-Tsang. In the 1960s, the Chinese government split Tibet into new administrative divisions: the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), and Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures within Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces. When the Chinese government references Tibet, it is referring to the TAR.
2. The last UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit Tibet was Mary Robinson in 1998, after repeated failed requests by her successors. Since then, China permitted UN High Commissioner Louise Arbour to visit China in 2005 but she was subsequently denied a visit to Tibet in 2008. Despite assurances that High Commissioner Navi Pillay could visit the country at “a time convenient to both sides,” a visit was never facilitated. To date, there are at least 25 outstanding visit requests to China by UN experts, some outstanding for over 15 years. Since China’s last UPR, 12 Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups have sent reminder requests to the Chinese authorities to conduct fact-finding visits. This includes three new reminder sent by the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, two by the Special Rapporteur on Torture# and two by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy. Despite China supporting a recommendation that it accept a visit from the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, this visit request has remained outstanding since 13 January 2003.