From: Office of the Representative of H.H. the Dalai Lama

(United Nations Affairs)

Press Release

22 August, 1995

Under intense political pressure exerted by the Chinese Government, the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) decided on 21 July 1995 not to recommend Tibetan and Tibet-related NGOs, along with eight others, for accreditation to the UN's Fourth World Conference on Women to be held in Bejing from 4-15 September 1995. That means no Tibetan advocacy groups could attend the Conference. To the parallel NGO Forum to be held some 52 kms away from the conference site from 30 August to 8 September, many Tibetan women had been issued the NGO Registration Letter and the Hotel Confirmation Letter by the China Organising Committee.

Under the agreement Bejing had signed with the NGO Facilitating Committee, China is required to issue visas to these Tibetan women. However, in gross contempt of its legal and moral obligations, all 52 Tibetan women in exile, including eleven from India, have been told by the concerned Chinese Embassies that they had been instructed by their Government not to issue them visas.

Both the ECOSOC and Chinese decisions, denying Tibetans accreditation and visa respectively, were totally political. They arose from the fact that China did not want the international community to hear a truthful account of the real situation in Tibet today. The ECOSOC decision obviously did not take into account the fact that this was to be a UN World Conference, not a Chinese world conference. It is hard to imagine how such a conference could claim to be a "world" conference when it would not take into account the situation of all the women in the world.

The stated theme of the Conference is "Equality, Development and Peace" as a basis for the advancement of the status of women. The primary focus of the conference and the Forum should therefore be the oppressed and the underprivileged women of the world. And yet it is precisely the most oppressed and the most underprivileged women in the world who have been denied the right to be heard both at the Conference and the Forum. There is no denying the fact that the credibility and the moral authority of the UN has been considerably undermined by these decisions. Such a state of affair tend to present the UN as the legitimator of Chinese oppression and human rights violations.

In all the UN organised world conferences in the last several years - be it the World Conference on Environment and Development in Rio (1992), the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna (1993), the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (1994), and the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen (1995) - the Tibetans were never denied the rights of partecipation on any basis, including the basis that China objected to their presence. The present decision had no legal basis and will set a bad precedent for future UN organised conferences.