Calls are installing in Europe for member states of the EU to enact legislation requiring that European diplomats, reporters, and scientists be approved access to travel in Tibet, an area mostly limited to outsiders while Chinese nationals can easily take a trip throughout European countries, a Tibet advocacy group stated in a brand-new report on Monday.

Composing in an op-ed on Monday appearing in European media papers and outlets, 57 parliamentarians from 19 European countries gotten in touch with their federal governments to pass a law disallowing access to Europe to Chinese authorities who obstruct foreign travel in Tibet, a previously independent Himalayan nation now ruled from Beijing.

“Government officials, journalists and tourists who seek to enter Tibetan areas are routinely denied, and the few who do get in are forced to stay on strictly controlled official tours,” the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet stated in a declaration on Monday.

“[There], they are revealed Potemkin towns that conceal the truth about China’s dreadful repression of the Tibetan people,” ICT stated, including that by rejecting unconfined access to Tibet, Beijing looks for to closed down criticism of what the rights group called “its atrocious human rights record in Tibet.”

There is now a growing awareness in Europe of the risks of an “asymmetrical relationship with China,” structure on current declarations by EU diplomacy chief Josep Borrell that Europe’s relationship with China must be based upon “trust, transparency, and reciprocity,” ICT stated.

“It is now incumbent upon European governments and the European Union to insist on reciprocity in their dealings with the People’s Republic of China,” stated Tsering Jampa, executive director for ICT Europe, in a declaration Monday.

“This principle should not be limited to trade and investment but should also include fundamental freedoms in order to address the asymmetry of China’s authoritarian influence not only in Tibet, which has been isolated from the rest of the world for the past six decades, but also on our own societies,” Jampa stated.

The benefit and right to travel

“We know that Tibet is closed to foreigners—to analysts, to members of parliament, to lawmakers, and so on,” stated ICT-EU policy director Vincent Matten, speaking on Monday to RFA’s Tibetan Service.

“But the opposite is not true. Chinese officials, journalists, and so on have the privilege and right to travel and to visit Europe.”

Current U.S. legislation rejecting access to the United States to Chinese authorities obstructing travel by Americans to Tibet might now act as a design for European policymakers, Matten stated, keeping in mind at the very same time that the “institutional architecture” throughout the EU’s numerous member states is various.

“So we need to have imaginative ways for the EU to think of how they could do this. But this is their job,” Matten stated.

In December 2018, President Donald Trump signed the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act, a law under which Chinese authorities accountable for omitting U.S. people, consisting of Americans of Tibetan ethnic origin, from China’s Tibet Autonomous Area (TAR), might be prohibited from getting in the United States.

The law likewise needs the State Department to supply to the Congress each year a list of U.S. people obstructed from entry to Tibet.

Reported by RFA’s Tibetan Service. Equated by Dorjee Damdul. Composed in English by Richard Finney.

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