When the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 after an uprising against Chinese rule, the United Nations responded quickly and clearly. Through Resolution 1353 (XIV), the international body expressed its deep concern for the “fundamental human rights and freedoms” of the Tibetan people and called for their protection.
In the early 1960s, two more resolutions, akin to moral rebukes of Beijing’s conduct, followed. These were moral rebukes of Beijing’s conduct and backed Tibet’s right to self-determination.
Since then, the international community has urged China, with varying intensity, to loosen its iron grip on the plateau and stop its campaign to forcibly assimilate Tibetans into a Han-dominated state by suffocating their cultural and religious identities. From Washington to Brussels, statements of concern have been issued multiple times. High commissioners have pleaded for access, and coalitions of nations have formed to censure Beijing.
China has, of course, been obstinate in its refusal to alter the course its modern-day colonialism has taken. Those in the echelons of power in Beijing have even framed the continued occupation of Tibet in the language of sovereignty and national unity. In Beijing’s telling, Tibet has been “an inseparable part of China since antiquity” and is now a showcase of economic progress.
Any criticism, even that from the very people of Tibet who China claims to have uplifted, is dismissed as politically motivated interference. That posture has endured through not years but eras, from the Cold War to China’s rise as a global power.
Now, nearly seven decades after the uprising, and despite internal and international pressure on China, the reality inside Tibet remains starkly unchanged: sweeping restrictions on religion and language, mass detentions, and stonewalling independent observers.
In Beijing’s telling, Tibet has been “an inseparable part of China since antiquity” and is now a showcase of economic progress.
Any criticism is dismissed as politically motivated
interference. That posture has endured through not years but eras— from the Cold War to China’s rise as a global power.
Decades of exhortations
While the language of international appeals has evolved, the message has been consistent. In the late 1980s, after protests in Lhasa were met with lethal force, the United States Congress passed resolutions recognising Tibet as an “occupied country” and lauding the Dalai Lama’s proposals for a negotiated settlement. The European Parliament followed with its own declarations, some explicitly endorsing his peace plans.
In 1991, the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (finally) broke a 26-year silence to adopt a resolution on Tibet, calling for an end to policies that threatened the Tibetan people’s cultural and religious identity. Human rights rapporteurs, from those investigating religious freedom to those documenting torture, pressed Beijing for access and accountability.
The message was amplified in 2012 when Navi Pillay, who was then the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, publicly warned that “social stability in Tibet will never be achieved through heavy security measures and suppression of human rights”.
The most recent decade has seen growing alignment among democracies. In 2020, a coalition of 39 countries including Britain, Japan, and nearly all European Union members used the UN General Assembly to call for “immediate and unfettered access” to Tibet for independent observers. It was one of the strongest joint statements in years, pairing Tibet with Xinjiang as emblematic of China’s disregard for minority rights.
Yet even these moments of unity have fallen short of securing change on the ground.
China’s unbending course
Beijing has let the appeals pile on, without any real accountability to the world for its role in choking human rights in full view. In fact, China’s position has only hardened. Since the 2008 uprising, the Communist Party has pursued a policy of near-total control over religious institutions, intensified “patriotic education” campaigns in monasteries, and implemented sweeping surveillance systems across the Tibetan plateau.
Political dissent is met with harsh punishment. Advocates for cultural rights, such as Tashi Wangchuk, have been imprisoned for years on charges of “inciting separatism” — a catch-all crime that conflates peaceful expression with a threat to the state. The boy recognised by the Dalai Lama as the Panchen Lama has remained disappeared since 1995, despite repeated UN requests for proof of his well-being.
China’s response to UN criticism has been strikingly consistent. It rejects all allegations of abuse, accuses the UN of bias, and mobilises a bloc of supportive states to counter any resolution or debate. When high commissioners or special rapporteurs request visits to Tibet, the answer is almost always the same: not now, not convenient. No UN human rights chief has been allowed in since 1998; no special rapporteur since 2005.
The UN’s “all bark, no bite” record
If Beijing has been steadfast in its resistance, the international community has been equally predictable in its restraint. UN bodies have not passed a Tibet-specific resolution in the General Assembly since 1965. In Geneva, the former UN Commission on Human Rights never succeeded in adopting a resolution on Tibet, with Chinese diplomats repeatedly blocking action through procedural manoeuvres.
The Human Rights Council, which replaced the commission in 2006, has fared no better. Tibet appears in the Universal Periodic Review process, but China rejects most recommendations outright. There have been no special sessions, no independent commissions of inquiry, no tangible consequences for defying decades of UN calls.
The reasons are familiar: China’s status as a permanent member of the Security Council, its economic leverage over developing countries, and its growing bloc of allies willing to shield it from censure. The result is a pattern of rhetorical condemnation without enforcement — a performance of concern that Beijing has learned to absorb without consequence.
A call for resolve
The arc of Tibet’s treatment at the UN reveals the limits of moral persuasion in the absence of political will. Strong words have been plentiful: in resolutions, in joint statements, in high commissioners’ speeches. What has been missing is the mechanism, and the unity, to convert those words into action that China cannot so easily ignore.
If the international community is serious about ending rights abuses in Tibet, it must move beyond symbolic gestures. That could mean creating a dedicated UN mechanism to monitor China’s treatment of Tibetans, linking access to economic or diplomatic benefits, or at minimum insisting on regular, unmonitored visits by human rights experts. Without such measures, every statement of concern risks being just another entry in a long, ineffectual record.
(Aritra Banerjee is a Defence & Foreign Affairs Columnist)
