Document No. 3
RESOLUTION TO EXPRESS SOLIDARITY ON THE CRITICAL SITUATION IN TIBET
Preamble
The Snowland of Tibet, known by its ancient name of Purgyal, sits on top of the world. It is endowed with beauty bestowed by nature and had flourished in its time with abundance of resources. Having come into existence since millennia ago, and ruled successively by twelve great kings and forty princely sovereigns, it is a nation with a long history, a well-defined territory and ancestry, genealogies, customs and traditions, and so forth, encapsulated in its government system, economy and cultural identity.
Since the emergence of its first king Nyatri Tsenpo in the second Century BCE, successive rulers of Tibet conquered territories in all four directions to consolidate a united Tibetan kingdom over which they exercised sovereign authority. The Tibetan history of conquests even includes the Tibetan army’s capture of the Tang dynasty capital Chang’an. And the Tibetan King Tri Ralpachen and China’s T’ang dynasty emperor Musong signed a treaty which said, among other things, that “Tibetans will be happy in Tibet and the Chinese in China, their own respective nations”. This Nephew-Uncle Treaty was inscribed on three stone pillars, of which the one erected in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, can still be seen standing today in front of the Tsuglakhang, clearly showing that Tibet and China were two separate countries. In short, Tibet at that time had become a powerful and prosperous country that flourished in central Asia, an indelible evidential fact etched in historical records beyond the reach of any effort at erasure.
Through the long course of history, there have been rises and falls in Tibet’s political power and influence. In such as a milieu, Tibet did have its period of fragmentation and decline. However, during that period, when the Mongols militarily conquered and ruled over vast regions of Europe and Asia, the Sakya religious leaders in Tibet established, for the first time, a relationship of patron and priest between the two nations. This tie-up led to the Sakya Lamas assuming sovereign political authority over Tibet. They were followed successively by other religious and other leaders, notably the Phagdru, Ripung, Depa Tsangpa, and the successive lineage holders of the Gaden Phodrang establishment, who each reigned as the political head and religious leader of Tibet. Tibet thus continued to flourish as a nation with its own unique and distinctive characters, including in the fields of religion, polity, economy, language, culture, customs and traditions, and so forth.
Tibet, the Land of Snows, has thus been an independent and sovereign nation with a long period of history. Nevertheless, in 1949, the Communist Government of China began it armed invasion of the country. In 1951, it coerced the Tibetan Government to sign the so-called 17-Point Agreement on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet. Nevertheless Tibetans pinned their hopes on positive changes coming from the Chinese side. Unfortunately, it did not take long for the Chinese invaders to act with brazenness to show their plunderous intentions and malicious designs while totally disregarding and trampling on the commitments it had made under the 17-Point Agreement. And so it strengthened its violent repression of the Tibetan people. Matters came to a head when on the 10th of March in 1959, Tibetans belonging to all the three provincial regions of the country rose in a spontaneous act of solidarity against the government of China to stage a large-scale, peaceful uprising in Capital Lhasa, protesting against the evil intentions and cruel actions with which it had illegally invaded their country. And on the 17th of that month, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the sovereign leader of Tibet, along with the cabinet of his government, as well as many tens of thousands of Tibetan people, were compelled to flee their country to live in exile.
In 1956, the Communist Chinese government started from the Dotoe and Domey provincial regions of Tibet its so-called Democratic Reform to, in practice, organize the Tibetan people into communes. It led to a historically unprecedented famine and campaign of executions that brought the Tibetan ethnic group to the brink of extinction. Wealth and properties accumulated over thousands of years were plundered. The late 10th Panchen Lama recorded about these developments in his well-known 70,000-character petition to the top leaders of China. Subsequently, the Communist Government of China launched its so-called great Cultural Revolution in Tibet. In the name of “Destroying the Four Olds” under this campaign, religious places were sacked with countless religious artifacts and treasures representative of the body, speech and mind of the Buddha and his teachings plundered or destroyed. These and other plunders led to inestimably enormous losses to Tibet. It was all part of the Communist Chinese Government’s efforts to eradicate the entirety of the religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions of the Tibetan people, as well as our customs and traditions.
The gravity of the situation under Chinese occupation rule led the Tibetan people in Tibet to carry out a series of peaceful mass protests on successive occasions from the year 1980 to 1990. And in 2008, the Great Earth-Mouse Peaceful Mass Uprising Protests took place, encompassing all the three provincial regions of Tibet. The Chinese Government launched a crackdown on it with military violence. Thousands of Tibetan people were killed or imprisoned. In the ever-worsening situation, a total of 157 known and verified number of Tibetan people have carried out self-immolations since 2009 in protests against the Communist Chinese Government. In the history of struggles for freedom in this world, this has been the first time people have campaigned for their ethnic and national causes by means of protesting with self-immolations.
Ever since the enemy Communist Government of China occupied Tibet and imposed its, more than a million and two-hundred thousand Tibetan people have been killed. Tens of thousands of others have been taken into custody. More than six thousand monasteries have been sacked and destroyed. Whole of Tibet have been subjected to reckless mineral extraction operations while deforestations, damming and diverting of rivers, and other destructive activities have been carried out relentlessly. These have resulted in the destruction of the natural environment of Tibet beyond all limits, with projects responsible for such mayhem still being pursued to this day. Besides all that, the situation in Tibet today continues to be marked by killings of its people, their imprisonment and torture, the deprivation of their human rights and religious freedom, the destruction of their language, tight restrictions on their movement, total denial of their freedoms of speech, press, and so forth. More than a million Tibetan children have been lodged in boarding schools in a continuing move to Sinicize them in a manner that is so grossly in violation of the international bill of human rights and basic norms of human decency as to amount to a genocidal eradication of the Tibetan ethnicity.
On April 24, 2026, the Department of State of the United States Government released two key reports on Tibet: the “Report to Congress on Access to Tibetan Areas” and the “Report to Congress on Tibet Negotiations.” The report on Access to Tibetan Areas highlighted the fact that China continued to harass and intimidate United States diplomats, journalists, and foreign nationals attempting to travel to Tibet by enforcing tight restrictions, overt surveillance, and other types of measures. And the report on Tibet Negotiations noted that there had been no formal negotiations between China and representatives of His Holiness the Dalai Lama since 2010, even as the United States government was continuing to urge for Sino-Tibetan dialogue in its effort towards the resolution of the Tibet issue. The report said the United States government was also actively exploring opportunities towards the preservation and maintenance of the unique religious and cultural heritage of the Tibetan people while expressing serious concern over China’s destructive actions. In addition, on April 16, 2026, eight United Nations human rights experts issued a joint statement expressing deep concern over China’s recently enacted “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress.”
On April 30, 2026, the European Parliament adopted a resolution which strongly condemned the so-called “Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress” passed by China’s National People’s Congress on March 12, 2026, noting that it grossly disregarded and violently trampled on the human rights of the Tibetan people and other ethnic minorities in the People’s Republic of China. The resolution warned that the law, which was scheduled to come into force on July 1, 2026, represented a systematic attempt to erase the cultural, religious and linguistic heritage of the Tibetan people by mandating state ideology and prioritising Mandarin over native languages in all public spheres. The resolution expressed firm rejection of China’s interference in Tibetan spiritual affairs, stating, in particular, that the succession of the Dalai Lama is a strictly religious matter that must be determined exclusively according to Tibetan Buddhist traditions, free from government coercion.
On April 29, 2026, United States Senators Rick Scott and Jeff Merkley introduced a bill called the “Tibet Atrocities Determination Act” which was based on the recognition of the fact that China’s repression in Tibet had increased. The bill directed the United States Secretary of State to submit a report to Congress within one year, making a formal determination on whether Chinese authorities are engaging in genocide or crimes against humanity in Tibet.
On May 4, 2026, Human Rights Watch, which is based in the United States, released a 72-page report which highlighted China’s coercive implementation of a bilingual education system for preschool students in the Tibetan region. The report noted that in 2021, China’s Ministry of Education had issued an order titled “Children’s Speech Harmonization Plan”, which mandated Mandarin as the only language of education for all preschoolers in all ethnic minority areas of the People’s Republic of China, including Tibet. What emerged as clear from this order was the fact that in the name of promoting its common national language, China coercively implemented its so-called bilingual education system across the Tibetan region, especially in its kindergartens and preschools, thereby effectively suppressing the teaching of Tibetan language. The report also highlighted the fact that preschool students in Tibet were being subjected to ideological indoctrination, with the aim to instil in them unwavering loyalty and trust in the Chinese Communist Party.
To sum up, ever since it seized control over the whole of the Tibetan territory, the Communist Chinese Government has been relentless in pursuing policies of extreme cruelty across all the traditional provinces of Tibet, threatening the very survival of the nation and its people, with the result that the seriousness of the political situation in it has kept on being on the brink, worsening with each passing month and year. It is because the situation of both the territory of Tibet and its human and material riches has thus been subjected to a downward spiral of deterioration that the Tibetan Parliament- in-Exile has adopted resolutions expressing solidarity with the Tibetan people in Tibet on successive occasions. And it has been seen as important at this first session of the 18th Tibetan Parliament- in-Exile to also adopt such a resolution of expressing solidarity with fellow-Tibetans in Tibet.
Resolution
1) The Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile wishes to offer prayers and expresses condolences to the
bereaved families and other loved ones of the patriotic men and women who under the repression, ill-treatment, and torture of the Communist Chinese Government have heroically sacrificed their lives and everything else dear to them for the Tibetan national, religious, and people’s causes with a great display of loyalty and determination, expressing heartfelt admiration for them. We pray that they be blessed by Avalokiteshvara, the protector of the world, to be reborn in the Snowland of Tibet, to again attain remarkable achievements for the sake of the Tibetan national, religious, and people’s causes.
2) The Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile demands that the Government of China bring an immediate halt to its policies of violent repression being implemented by it with extraordinary cruelty and in violation of the basic human rights of the Tibetan people. Likewise, the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile wishes to express in strongest possible terms its opposition to the Chinese government’s legal measures to implement its policy to Sinicize Tibetan Buddhism, and to incarcerate Tibetan children in boarding schools where they are kept away from their parents, community, language, and culture, with the aim to Sinicize and thereby assimilate them. The Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile accordingly demands that the Government of China respect the wishes of the Tibetan people to enjoy their human rights, and to exercise their religious, cultural, and linguistic freedoms.
3) The Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile wishes to reiterate its demand to release the 11th Panchen Lama Gedhun Yeshe Trinley (Gedhun Choekyi Nyima) and all Tibetan political prisoners as soon as possible. They continue to remain imprisoned and suffer ill-treatment under China’s repressive occupation rule, and China must bear full responsibility for their lives and freedom as a basis for them to exercise their basic human rights.
4) Historically, Tibet was never a part of China; rather, it was a fully independent nation. Nevertheless, the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile wishes to reiterate its demand that the Government of China engage in efforts to resolve the present Sino-Tibetan conflict through negotiations on the basis of being appreciative of the mutually beneficial Middle Way Policy.
5) The Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile wishes to express gratitude to the Government and people of India for their support, the magnitude of which defies any possibility of repayment. When the situation in Tibet became critical, the government and the Congress of the United States of America and, likewise, countries in Europe and Asia, as well as non-governmental organizations from everywhere, and others have extended help and backing to our just cause. To all of them, the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile wishes to express infinite gratitude.
6) Ever since the Communist Chinese Government invaded and occupied Tibet, the Tibetan people in Tibet have been subjected to such extremely cruel policies of repression that they have continued to suffer from an endlessness of insufferable days and nights, which continues to this day. To all of them subjected to such abject suffering, the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile wishes to express empathy and solidarity. The Tibetan people living in exile in free countries should not waste the opportunity they have to publicize the Tibetan cause, lobby support from governments, and so forth, for which purpose we should collectively enhancing our efforts more than ever before. And we should redouble our efforts towards the preservation and promotion of our religion, culture, language and script in the struggle for the just cause of Tibet in all and in whatever aspect we can in this endeavour. And so be it adopted accordingly with the unanimous approval of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile on June 2, 2026.
The above resolution was unanimously adopted after a thorough discussion by the 18th Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile during its first session on June 3, 2026.
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* In case of any discrepancy between this English translation and its Tibetan original, the latter should be considered authoritative and final for all purposes.
