The German federal government failed to meet the parliamentarians’ demands for Tibet

Twenty years after the German Bundestag’s much-noticed Tibet-Resolution, the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) draws a critical balance. The human rights organization is disappointed about the fact that the government did not manage to meet even one of the parliamentarians’ demands. “It is disappointing that the leading political parties in Germany didn’t go to much effort to implement the parliament’s decision. Worse, we have to assume that a similar initiative would be hardly imaginable today. Nowadays, the party leaders would probably not even be able to agree on a statement like this – for fear of China’s response,” said Ulrich Delius, the STP’s Asia-consultant, in Göttingen on Thursday. “China’s influence has grown significantly – and ethical values and human rights issues don’t seem to play a very important role in the foreign policy of Germany and the European Union any more.”

On April 23, 1996, the CDU/CSU, the SPD, the FDP and the Green Party had proposed the resolution. On June 20, 1996, it was then adopted with no votes against, and with only three abstentions, without a further parliamentary debate. The MPs had not given in to the Chinese government’s protests and threats about possible sanctions. Back then, the media had reported about the resolution’s background for several days, mentioning the human rights violations in Tibet and the attempts of the government in Beijing to influence the German parliament – similar to the recent case of the adopted resolution concerning the Armenian genocide.

In the resolution, China’s authorities were accused of serious human rights violations, of being responsible for environmental degradation, as well as for a far-reaching economic, legal, social and political discrimination of the Tibetan people. The Bundestag had called on the Federal Government to demand an end to human rights violations. In particular, the MPs had demanded more initiatives against the Chinese government’s plans to encourage Chinese migrants to settle in Tibet to undermine the Tibetan culture. In addition, the Federal Government was asked to pay special attention to the situation in Tibet in the scope of the human rights bodies of the United Nations.

“The demands are still relevant today. But the situation of the Tibetans has deteriorated significantly since 1996,” said Delius. Further, he criticized: “If the federal government thinks it’s enough to just mention the precarious human rights situation in Tibet in some subordinate clause once a year, that’s simply not enough to deal with the ongoing deterioration of the region.”