The New York Times

Friday, March 05, 1999

UN BARS ETHNIC TIBETAN S TALK, STIRRING PROTESTS

by Paul Lewis

UNITED NATIONS, March 4 - United Nations officials have prevented an ethnic Tibetan from addressing the organization's Commission on the Status of Women, saying this might offend the Chinese delegation and result in China's opposing the accreditation of some women's groups to the world organization.

Losang Rabgey, a Canadian citizen of Tibetan origin who represent an international human rights group called the Transnational Radical Party, was chosen to address the commission as one of five delegates. Her topic was to be violence against women in occupied territories.

But on Wednesday, officials from the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women said she would not be allowed to speak, explaining that her name was identifiably Tibetan.

Ms. Rabgey then asked another scheduled speaker to mention the exclusion in her address.

The speaker did, and United Nations officials refused to let any of the three other scheduled speakers take the floor.

A United Nations spokeswomen said officials in the division for the Advancement for Women insisted that the reason Ms. Rabgey was not allowed to speak was that they thought her topic was not relevant to the commission's work.

But Janice Mantell, executive director of the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, said it was "unacceptable that a United Nations body entrusted to promote the human rights of women cannot hear from a participant because her ethnic identity is a politically sensitive issue for china." She said, "Tibetans are a target of China's colonial expansion directly resulting in human rights violations, including violence against women."