Tim Loughton – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Tim Loughton on 2016-04-25.
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, pursuant to the Answer of 11 April 2016 to Question 32522, who the 22 Tibetans referred to in that Answer are; and what the response was of the Chinese authorities in the case of each such Tibetan.
Mr Hugo Swire
We included the cases of nine Tibetans detained by the Chinese authorities on a list of cases submitted to the Chinese delegation ahead of the 2015 UK-China Human Rights Dialogue. These included Tenzin Delek Rinpoche and Dhondup Wangchen. In 2014, we included the names of 16 Tibetan individuals on our case list. Three cases, including Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, appeared on both case lists. The UK-China Human Rights Dialogue is a platform for detailed, expert exchanges on human rights issues. We do not make our full case lists public as in some cases the individuals concerned do not want us to. We do not publish Chinese responses to cases raised as we assess this will be counter-productive. We continue to make our concerns about the human rights situation in China, including Tibet, known publicly via other means, such as in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Annual Report on Human Rights and Democracy.
