Mr. Chair, thank you so much for having me on behalf of Human Rights Watch. We appreciate the opportunity to participate. I also want to pass our congratulations on regarding the extraordinary passage of M-62 last week, which was a wonderful effort to behold.
Human Rights Watch began tracking language-medium education issues in Tibetan areas more than a decade ago, when proposals to phase out Tibetan-medium instruction in Tibetan areas of Qinghai province prompted protests that were crushed. The January 2016 arrest of Tashi Wangchuk, a language activist, suggested that Chinese authorities were taking a harder line on the issue.
Nevertheless, it was extremely difficult to document policy shifts. However, in March 2020 we were able to publish research showing that, consistent with Chinese Communist Party Secretary General Xi Jinping's broad and aggressive assimilationist campaign of sinicization, Chinese authorities' claims that they were providing so-called bilingual education to Tibetan children were, quite simply, a lie.
Our research showed that the policy, carried out for the past decade across what Chinese authorities call the Tibet Autonomous Region and in Tibetan areas in other provinces, had actually increased Chinese-medium schooling at all levels except in the study of the Tibetan language itself.
Under the guise of improving access to education, Chinese authorities established compulsory bilingual kindergartens to immerse Tibetan children in the Chinese language and state propaganda from age three, in the name of strengthening the unity of nationalities. They also hired thousands of non-Tibetan-speaking teachers from other parts of China under the Aid-Tibet program and promoted ethnically mixed classes in which, if even one Chinese-speaking child was present, the entire class would be taught in Chinese rather than in Tibetan.
In September 2019, parents and teachers in six rural townships in the Nagchu municipality in the northern TAR told Human Rights Watch that, as of March 2019, their local primary schools had switched to using Chinese as the language of education. These are violations of international human rights law and of the Chinese constitution.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights stipulate respect for mother-tongue education. UN committees on the rights of the child; economic, social and cultural rights; and the elimination of racial discrimination have all expressed concern over the rights of Tibetans to education in their own language and culture across China.
China's constitution guarantees minority-language rights. Moreover, these policies are also in profound contention with best practices with respect to education, which strongly suggest mastery in the mother tongue prior to learning other languages. It is worth noting that many of the Tibetan parents to whom we spoke stressed that they wanted their children to learn both languages, but not at the cost of learning in just one of those. These policies are a profound threat to Tibetans' identity.
The Canadian government should not only raise its concerns about these practices at bilateral meetings and international forums, but also actively support the preservation of Tibetan-medium education, including teaching materials and teachers.
I am happy to provide more recommendations, but I want to make sure not to exceed my time.
Thank you very much.