Release The Panchen Lama - 15 Years of Silence and Neglect

Dear High Commissioner Pillay

Since the age of 6 Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the genuine Panchen Lama of Tibet, has been a political prisoner of the Chinese regime. He has now had 15 years of his life taken away from him, many would say stolen, by the Chinese regime. And the organization which you represent has done nothing to bring about an end to what was in fact, state-sponsored kidnapping of a child and his illegal detention under international law.

The position you occupy and those of your colleagues, includes ethical obligations and responsibilities to ensure the human rights of vulnerable people are protected. No one could be more vulnerable than a 6 year old child who represents the religious and cultural aspirations of his people as the second highest leader in Tibet, particularly when his people are subjected to the harshest possible treatment by a regime intent on wiping out all Tibetan national characteristics and assimilating them into the Han majority.

For 15 years your office, under the name of human rights, has allowed itself, either deliberately or naively, to be side-tracked by the Chinese regime's fraudulent claims that due to the Panchen Lama's young age, they took him under their protection at the request of his parents to avoid being abducted by Tibetan "splittists", that the Panchen Lama and his family want to be left alone to lead an ordinary life, and other such false claims. Well the Panchen Lama is now an adult of 21 years of age and no amount of false claims by the Chinese regime can be legally, ethically or morally acceptable to your office to justify his continued disappearance and detention, however much the Chinese regime seek to legitimize such claims or however much you acquiesce or appease to them.

The situation of the Panchen Lama and his family remains a criminal act under international law by a regime which pays only the most superficial lip service to the outside world regarding the rights of its own citizens, and none to those living in the territories it occupies. In many people's view, for your office to continue to ignore the illegal detention of the Panchen Lama puts you merely one step above the regime which abducted him.

At no time have you acted to independently verify the well-being of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and his family by insisting to the Chinese regime on a face to face meeting with the family, or even at the most minimal level have you obtained an up to date photograph of him. Neither have you investigated witnesses who stated they saw the Panchen Lama and his family in Nagchu and Golmud, Tibet just 3 days after the Dalai Lama named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the Panchen Lama of Tibet, that Chinese forces attempted to seperate the Panchen Lama from his family, to which the family resisted, and at which point the entire family were put on a plane bound for China where nothing has been seen or heard from them since 1995. This clear case of state-sponsored abduction raises the following questions: is your office seriously willing to accept that the Panchen Lama and his family voluntarily agreed to be disappeared, surrender their human rights and be held incommunicado with the outside world for 15 years? Such an acceptance strains any credibility beyond belief which your office may have left. Or, as in the view of many people, has your agenda on human rights been hi-jacked in favor of cheap trade with China?

Articles 9, 13 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights state the following:

9. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

13. (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of a state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

When have these principles, which form the core of the U.N. organization, been upheld in the criminal abduction, continued detention and lack of the most basic human rights and freedom of the Panchen Lama? Basic human rights and freedom which all of us in free societies take for granted.

Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said in an interview several years ago that the U.N. have all the resources it needs to solve most of the world's problems; the one thing it did not have, he said, was the political will. A very telling and accurate comment. For 15 years the U.N. have consistently and shamefully ignored the above articles on human rights for the sake of increasing trade with China at the expense of the most basic human rights of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and his family. No doubt if such an abduction had taken place to a relative of a U.N. official by a country with no such lucrative trade agreements, decisive action would have been taken against the abductors using the full force of international law.

It is absolutely clear that the U.N. have seriously failed to uphold its core values on human rights and the rule of law in the case of the Panchen Lama.

We, the signatories of this petition, demand that your office enforce these core principles by taking immediate and permanent action to ensure that Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and his family are released from China's illegal detention to a place of their own choosing where they can exercise the human rights which are fundamental to them as human beings. Anything less than this makes the founding principles of the U.N. not worth the paper they are written on.