Human rights in Tibet

Human rights in Tibet is a contentious issue. According to a 1992 Amnesty International report, judicial standards in China, including in Tibet, were not up to "international standards". The report charged the Chinese Communist Party government with keeping political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, including the death penalty in its penal code, ill-treatment of detainees and inaction in the face of ill-treatment of detainees, including torture, the use of the death penalty, extrajudicial executions, forced abortions and sterilisation. The status of religion, mainly as it relates to figures who are both religious and political, such as the 14th Dalai Lama, is a regular object of criticism.

Reported abuses of human rights in Tibet include restricted freedom of religion, belief, and association. Specifically, Tibetans have faced arbitrary arrest and maltreatment in custody, including torture at the hands of Chinese authorities. Freedom of the Press in the PRC is still absent, and Tibet's media is tightly controlled by the Chinese leadership, making it difficult to determine accurately the scope of human rights abuses. A series of reports published in the late 1980s claimed that China was forcing Tibetans to adhere to strict birth control programs that included forced abortions, sterilizations, and even infanticide.

Before the Invasion of Tibet in 1951, Tibet was ruled by a theocracy and had a caste-like social hierarchy. Official crackdowns in the region generally center on “the three evils of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism,” which give pretext for abuses.

Likewise, to journalist and writer Israel Epstein, a foreign-born Chinese citizen and member of the Chinese communist party, "the old society" in Tibet "had nothing even remotely resembling human rights." He explains: "High and low, the belief had for centuries been enforced on the Tibetans that everyone's status was predetermined by fate, as a reward for virtues or penalty for faults on one's past incarnations. Hence it was deemed senseless for the rich (even though compassion was abstractly preached) to have qualms about sitting on the necks of the poor, and both criminal and blasphemous for the poor not to patiently bear the yoke. ‘Shangri-La’ the old Tibet was definitely not."

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