འབྲེལ་གཏུགས་གསར་འཕྲིན།
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A Free Monthly Publication For Tibetan Issues & Community Information Rgd No. HPENG/2013/51798
A Self-immolation in Golug Kunchok, 42, burned himself in front of a police station in Tsang Khor town in Gade County, in the Golog region of Tibet on September 16. Tibetans nearby managed to douse the flames and rushed Kunchok to hospital in Xining where his medical condition is reported to be very serious with most of his body burned. His family are concerned that he will not survive. reports Radio Free Asia. Information about Kunchok’s selfimmolation is surfacing only now as local Tibetans did not want to put him or those who assisted him at risk of arrest, and details of the hospital in which he is being kept are being withheld to prevent him being detained by security forces. Most surviving self-immolators are detained incommunicado; those who die in custody or whose bodies are taken by the police are usually cremated by the authorities who return the ashes to the family, preventing them from conducting normal funeral services. “He is now in great pain...he often breaks down in tears over his failure to die in the self-immolation. He regrets not accomplishing what he planned to do” a source has told Radio Free Asia. Kunchok’s chances of survival are said to be “slim”. He has a son and a daughter who are a monk and a nun in a local monastery.
Volume: XVI Issue: 9
31 october 2014
The New UN Rights Commissioner Turns His Attentions to Tibet By Annie Padwick Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, the new United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights, has announced
Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein Photo: Reuters/Denis Balibouse
plans to visit Tibet. During a media briefing he expressed his intention to “move around” the region in a multi-day visit, but said he is still in preliminary discussions with the Chinese authorities to arrange this. China provisionally agreed to a visit from the UN rights chief during a periodic review at the UN Human Rights Council last year. Groundwork for the visit was established by Ms Navi Pillay, predecessor to Al-Hussein, who had urged China to address the allegations of rights violations in Tibet, and the alarming escalation of desperate forms of protest in the region. Tibet has been a focus for many UN Human Rights chiefs, but repeated requests to visit have been turned down. Following a UN review of China’s human rights record, China rejected all recommendations except the one to facilitate a visit from the UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights and Special Rapporteur to Tibet. If Al-Hussein’s visit to Tibet goes ahead as planned, he will be the first UN Rights chief to visit China and Tibet since 1998. The Human Rights Commissioner for the UN is mandated to promote and protect the enjoyment and full realisation, by all people, of all rights established in the UN Charter and in international human rights laws and treaties. Al-Hussein, previously Jordan’s ambassador to the United States, has been outspoken on human rights since his appointment in September this year, and his interest in China and Tibet has been highly commended by Tibetan activists and supporters. When asked at a press conference if he might visit other areas of China, Al-Hussein answered, “In the initial dialogue, we spoke of a multi-day visit, so I suspect that I would move around if indeed we are able to get the visit in place soon.” Many hope that
Al-Hussein will also include a visit to Xinjiang, an area which has seen escalating protest and unrest, together with disproportionate crackdown by Chinese authorities on the minority Muslim Uyghur community in recent years.