Representative Kelsang Gyaltsen with the US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Taiwan, on August 3, 2022. Photo: office of Tibet in Taiwan

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Taipei, Taiwan — Bawa Kelsang Gyaltsen, Representative of Office of Tibet in Taiwan, met with the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and talked about the deteriorating human rights situation and the CCP's increasingly extreme policy of ethnic, religious and cultural genocide in Tibet.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan on August 2, 2022, as part of her trip to the Asian countries, and met with seven human rights activists at the National Human Rights Museum in Taiwan on August 3, 2022, including pro-democracy activist Wuer Kaixi, Taiwanese human rights activist Mr Li Mingzhe, persecuted by China, Mr Lin Rongji, from Causeway Bay Bookstore in Hong Kong, and Kelsang Gyaltsen, representative of Office of Tibet in Taiwan, where they participated in a one-hour roundtable discussion on various topics concerning democracy and human rights.

Representative Kelsang Gyaltsen spoke to Speaker Pelosi about the deteriorating human rights situation in Tibet and the CCP's increasingly extreme policy of ethnic, religious and cultural genocide in Tibet. He also informed her about the CCP's so-called boarding school technique, which involves forcing Tibetan children to study in boarding schools away from their parents, in order to achieve the assimilation of Tibetan culture and religion, among other things. He also asked the co-organisers of the October Global Democracy Meeting to invite His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the conference, saying that this would send a clear and strong message to the CCP about global solidarity with Tibet.

“Current CCP’s chairperson Xi Jinping’s approach to Tibet, the so-called “The Party’s New Generation Policy on the Governance of Tibet” focuses on the annihilation and assimilation of the Tibetan people, as well as eliminating the Dalai Lama’s influence in Tibet. These measures have stirred up even stronger resistance from the Tibetans,” said the Representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Taiwan remarking that Tibet has now become a ‘giant prison’.

He also said that the decades-long genocide in Tibet should continue to receive a lot of attention and support from the international community, even though the world is currently grappling with the Ukraine crisis. Lamenting the initial lack of support and attention from the international community during the occupation of Tibet, the representative said that things might have been different if China had received the same pressure from the international community as Russia does today. As much as Russia has been criticised for its presence in the UN Human Rights Council, China deserves to be ridiculed and criticised for its presence in the UN and other international organisations, given its poor human rights record.

"No one can be sure that the tragedy that befell Ukraine would not happen to Taiwan, a free, democratic and robust country. Only when China transforms itself into a full democracy, can we truly eliminate the destruction and threat of the CCP to Taiwan and the rest of the world,?" the Representative said.

Kelsang Gyaltsen, in his closing remarks, thanked the continued support of countries such as India, the United States, European countries and Taiwan, and called on Speaker Pelosi and the US government to press the CCP to engage with the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA).