Geneva — Tibetan researcher Tenzin Dorjee delivered a powerful speech at a panel discussion during the 18th United Nations Forum on Minority Issues. Chinese representatives twice attempted to prevent him from speaking the truth, but failed. He revealed to representatives from 26 countries that the Chinese government had locked up more than one million people from East Turkistan in detention camps, banned the use of the Mongolian language, and used the classic colonial tool of boarding schools to strip approximately one million Tibetan children of their language, culture, and identity.
The 18th session of the United Nations Forum on Minority Issues was held at the United Nations Office in Geneva, under the auspices of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), on 27 and 28 November 2025. The Forum brought together UN officials, human rights experts, minority rights advocates, civil society groups, academics and representatives of minority communities from around the world. Among them were Phuntsok Topgyal, Advocacy Officer at the Tibet Office in Geneva; Tenzin Dorjee, Senior Researcher and Strategist at the Tibet Action Institute; Pema Dolma and Tenzin Tselha from Students for a Free Tibet (United States); Tenzin Dolkar from the Tibetan Legal Association, Dharamshala, India; Jamyang, a Tibetan trainee from India; Sangay Kyab, Chinese Liaison Officer from the Tibet Bureau in Geneva, and Thinlay Chukki, representative of the Tibet Office in Geneva.
Tenzin Dorjee, delivered a powerful speech to representatives from 26 countries at a roundtable discussion held as part of the 18th United Nations Forum on Minority Issues on November 28, 2025. Representatives from China twice attempted to prevent him from speaking the truth about the situation in Tibet and other regions, but they failed, and the chair continued to allow him to speak freely.
He said to the gathering,"From Europe to America to Africa, we are seeing a rise of in exclusive nationalism and internal colonialism, where powerful but insecure states are disempowering and did franchising minorities. One place where minorities have been most persecuted is the People’s Republic of China. Since 2012, Beijing has adopted a range of hardline policies that seeks to achieve the wholesale conversation and forced assimilation of Tibetan, Uyghur, and Mongolian people into the Han ethnic group."
"All because the government believes that the only path to political stability is through cultural uniformity and ethnic homogeneity. That in order to ensure national stability minority ethnic identities must disappear. In East Turkistan, Beijing has rounded up more than one million into detention camps. It breaks my heart whenever I see my Uyghur friends because every single one of them has least one family member in the camps. In the Inner Mongolia, Beijing has banned the use of the Mongolian language in Schools as well as public and social life. Thanks to this policy of cultural and linguistic erasure, about 30% of Mongolians in PRC can no longer speak their mother tongue," he added.
The Tibetan researcher said, "In Tibet, including TAR, plus Kham and Amdo, Beijing is using the classic colonial tool of residential schooling, to strip children of their language, culture and identity. The government has placed three out of every four Tibetan students in the colonial boarding schools, where 800,000 to 900,000 Tibetan kids aged six to 18 are methodically being turned into Chinese. If this is news to you, I invite you to look up a report titled "Separation From Their Families, Hidden from the world: China’s Vast System of Colonial Boarding Schools inside Tibet".
"Sometimes states attacks minorities because they view multiculturalism as a problem. But here’s the thing about multiculturalism, if your society is multicultural because of immigration, you are actually lucky, because immigrants contribute so much to the society and demand so little. They are often willing to assimilate if that helps them succeed in other domains of life," he explained.
Tenzin Dorjee stated, referring to the Chinese government, "But if your society is multicultural because you invaded or displaced some other nations in the past, then you have a much greater moral and legal obligation to provide them cultural autonomy and linguistic accommodation. These people have the right to self determination under international law."
"Some argue that ethnic diversity leads to collective action problems, hampering creation of an overarching civil identity and others disagree. But here is what we know for sure. A hard line top down approach to create unity never works, it backfires. We know that states worry about secessionism. We also know from countless studies that it is not diversity, but the forced imposition of cultural homogeneity that triggers secessionism. It is not the fulfilment of self determination but the denial of self determination that paves the way to secessionism, radicalisation, even terrorism. So every state should remember that; if you have one terrorist in the your country, you have a problem, if you have a million terrorists in your country, then perhaps you are the problem," he concluded.
Dorjee then made the following recommendations to the states and the Chinese government:
- Recommend states to allow national minorities to exercise the right to maintain and develop their own language and cultural practices.
- The PRC should close its colonial residential and reopen local schools, so that people, children are not separated from their families.
