Chinese authorities have been gathering DNA samples across Tibet, including from kindergarten children, without the apparent consent of their parents, Human Rights Watch said.
There is new evidence showing a systematic DNA collection drive for entire populations across Tibet as part of a “crime detection” drive, the rights organization said in a report released yesterday.
“There is no publicly available evidence suggesting people can decline to participate or that police have credible evidence of criminal conduct that might warrant such collection,” it said, adding that mass collection for such a purpose is a serious human rights violation in that it “cannot be justified as necessary or proportionate.”
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The DNA collection drives described in the report began in 2019 under a policing campaign called the “three greats” — inspection, investigation and mediation — designed to bolster China’s intensive grassroots-level policing system.
The report also cited two government tenders for the construction of local DNA databases in 2019.
Citing publicly available police and state media publications, Human Rights Watch identified drives in 14 distinct localities across every prefecture-level region in the Tibet Autonomous Region, including one whole prefecture, two counties, two towns, two townships and seven villages.
It also detected some collection drives on Tibetan regions outside the Tibetan Autonomous Region.
The report described the campaign as “intrusive policing,” taking samples from all residents of some villages, including those as young as five, or of all male residents.
In a January report, police described efforts in Chonggye County to conduct information registration and DNA collection.
“No village must be omitted from a township, no household must be omitted from a village and no person must be omitted from a household,” it said.
Tibet has been under Chinese control since it was annexed more than 70 years ago, in what Tibetans describe as an invasion and Beijing says was a peaceful liberation from theocratic rule. It is among border regions including Xinjiang and Mongolia subject to long-running crackdowns on the religious and cultural practices of non-Han ethnic minorities.
In April, police in Lhasa municipality’s Nyemo County collected DNA from entire classes of children at three kindergartens, with no suggestion in the publicly available reports that parents were involved in the consent process, the report said.
It said the stated purpose of “crime detection” did not appear to be legitimate or proportionate, or in the child’s best interests, and the extraction of DNA in a school setting without the consent of caregivers or an apparent option to refuse was a violation of the children’s privacy.
One publicly available report on the school collection drive said that police had “promptly eliminated the doubts and concerns of the masses and obtained the support and understanding of the collected persons” by explaining “the necessity and importance of DNA samples collected by the public security organs.”
Government DNA collection is sometimes justified as an investigative tool, but must be “comprehensively regulated, narrow in scope and proportionate to meeting a legitimate security goal,” Human Rights Watch said. “DNA information is highly sensitive and can facilitate a wide array of abuses if collected or shared non-consensually.”
The researchers said the Tibetan Autonomous Region campaign was similar in scope to DNA collection drives in Xinjiang, which targeted communities en masse rather than individual cohorts of concern, such as recently released prisoners, as has occurred elsewhere in China.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press representative for Tibet declined to comment.
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