According to Human Rights Watch, Chinese authorities have been collecting DNA samples across Tibet, including from kindergarten children, without the apparent consent of their parents. The rights organization claimed new evidence showing a systematic DNA collection drive for entire populations across Tibet as part of a ‘crime detection’ drive in a new report released on Monday. ‘ There is no publicly available evidence suggesting people can refuse 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 ‘cannot be justified as necessary or proportionate’.
The DNA collection drives described in the report began in 2019 as part of a policing campaign known as the ‘three greats’ (inspection, investigation, and mediation), which aimed to strengthen China’s intensive grassroots-level policing system. In addition, two government tenders for the construction of local DNA databases in 2019 were mentioned in the report.
Human Rights Watch identified drives in 14 distinct localities across the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), citing publicly available police and state media publications, including one entire prefecture, two counties, two towns, two townships, and seven villages. It also discovered some collection drives in Tibetan areas outside of the TAR. The campaign was described as ‘intrusive policing,’ with samples taken from all residents of some villages, including children as young as five, or from all male residents. Police described efforts in Chonggye county to conduct information registration and DNA collection in a January report.
Tibet has been under Chinese control since it was annexed more than 70 years ago, in what Tibetans call an invasion and Beijing calls a peaceful liberation from theocratic rule. It is one of several border regions, including Xinjiang and Mongolia, that has long cracked down on non-Han ethnic minorities’ religious and cultural practices. According to the report, police in Nyemo county, Lhasa municipality, collected DNA from entire classes of children at three kindergartens in April, with no indication that parents were involved in the consent process.
It stated that the stated purpose of ‘crime detection’ did not appear to be legitimate, proportionate, or in the best interests of the child, and that the extraction of DNA in a school setting without the consent of caregivers or an obvious option to refuse was a violation of the children’s privacy. According to one publicly available report on the school collection drive, police ‘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’.
Human Rights Watch stated that while government DNA collection is sometimes justified as an investigative tool, it must be ‘completely regulated, narrow in scope, and proportionate to meeting a legitimate security goal. DNA information is highly sensitive and can facilitate a wide range of abuses if collected or shared without consent’ it said. According to the researchers, the TAR campaign was similar in scope to DNA collection drives in Xinjiang, which targeted communities as a whole rather than individual cohorts of concern, such as recently released prisoners, as has occurred elsewhere in China.
In the past, human rights groups have expressed concern about China’s DNA collection. The government established a national DNA database in 2000, which contains information from at least 40 million people. According to Human Rights Watch, Chinese law appears to limit the collection of DNA samples to people associated with a specific criminal case, but police have conducted campaigns to collect DNA biometric information from regular citizens for an ‘unspecified need to ‘solve crimes.’
‘Any compelled collection or government use, according to the rights group, is a ‘serious intrusion on the right to privacy’. ‘Forcing people to give blood samples, or taking blood samples without informed, meaningful, and freely given consent or justification, can infringe on an individual’s privacy, dignity, and right to bodily integrity’. The press representative for Tibet at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment.
Post Your Comments