A Tibetan man serving a 21-year sentence for providing information to foreign-based media has died from prison injuries, an international rights group has said.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that Kunchok Jinpa, 51, died in a hospital in the city of Lhasa on Feb. 6 less than three months after being transferred there from prison without his family’s knowledge. Local sources said he had suffered a brain hemorrhage and was paralyzed.
There had been no news of Kunchok Jinpa’s whereabouts since his detention in 2013. The rights group said that new information indicates that Chinese authorities detained him on Nov. 8, 2013, providing his family no information on his whereabouts, and later convicted him of leaking state secrets for passing information to foreign media about local environmental and other protests in his region.
“Kunchok Jinpa’s death is yet another grim case of a wrongfully imprisoned Tibetan dying from mistreatment,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at HRW. “Chinese authorities responsible for arbitrary detention, torture or ill-treatment, and the death of people in their custody should be held accountable.”
HRW stated that Kunchok Jinpa’s 21-year sentence is unparalleled for such an offense, and no information about his trial or conviction had been publicly available outside China until now.
He was one among reportedly hundreds of Tibetans from Driru, a county in Nagchu prefecture (now municipality), who were detained after a series of peaceful protests in October 2013 against official demands that villagers fly Chinese flags from every house.
Kunchok Jinpa had been working as a tour guide for over a decade before his arrest. It’s believed he had provided information via social media or directly to Tibetan media outside China about a protest in May 2013 against planned mining on a sacred mountain, Naklha Dzamba, together with the names of those detained for involvement in the protest.
During the crackdown by security forces on the 2013 protests in Driru, there were reports of firing on unarmed protesters, mass arrests, dozens sentenced on political charges of up to 18 years, and several deaths in custody. HRW recently received information that more than 1,325 local people were detained at that time, of whom about 670 were eventually sentenced and imprisoned, although this cannot be confirmed.
A collective statement from UN human rights experts in June last year underlined the need for an independent investigation of the range of human rights violations by the Chinese government. They expressed grave concern over the regime’s failures to respect human rights and abide by its international obligations, and recommended the establishment of an impartial and independent UN mechanism to monitor and report on abuses “in view of the urgency of the situations” in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet.
