Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister's comments. I recall that as a backbencher, he expressed concerns regarding the repression of religious minorities, including Christians in Pakistan. In the case of Tibet, we are dealing with a 60-year history of repression of its people, their Buddhist religion and their profound and ancient traditions. Representatives of the International Campaign for Tibet made a presentation at the 28th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva setting out the human rights situation and outlining the growing despair of the Tibetan people. There has been a great deal of outrage recently about what is happening in Crimea. The reality is that in 1958 and 1959 the People's Republic of China essentially absorbed a millennia-old nation.

The World Uyghur Congress has provided a long list of instances of oppression of the Uyghur people. The International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation states that Uyghurs are subjected to compulsory unpaid labour, including in the construction of a pipeline to export local petroleum resources to other parts of China. The Uyghurs are the only population in China consistently subjected to executions for political crimes, and these executions are both summary and public. A UN training seminar for Uyghur youth took place in Geneva in November, which is a positive development. However, there is ongoing and serious repression of people in the region, which used to be known as East Turkestan. The Uyghur Government, which is in exile in Kazakhstan, is calling on countries such as Ireland, which has its own history of repression, to speak up for it. Will the Minister now take a much more vigorous role in standing up for these two oppressed peoples? It is particularly apt that we should seek to help them at a time when we are reflecting on events in our own history in the period from 1915 to 1923.

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