Exclusive: China's exit bans prevent Tibetans from visiting Dalai Lama in India - Safeguard Defenders to WION

China under Xi Jinping has been preventing millions of people from leaving the country, according to a new report by Spain-based rights group Safeguard Defenders. Speaking to WION after the release of the report, the NGO said the so-called exit bans are preventing Tibetans from getting passports to visit the Dalai Lama in India.

The exit bans are often deployed to target persecuted ethnic minorities such as Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists, the Safeguard Defenders report suggests.

"Acquiring a passport if you are Tibetan or Uyghur is almost impossible and has been difficult for many years," Dinah Gardner, Research Director at the Taiwan Office of Safeguard Defenders told WION.

The passport control on Tibetans

"From at least since 2012, China has actively tried to prevent Tibetans inside China from visiting the Dalai Lama in India," Gardner told WION.

"Tibetans who follow the Dalai Lama are seen as a risk to the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on power," Gardner added while referring to Beijing's territorial assertion about Tibet being part of China.

For centuries, Tibet was India’s actual neighbour, as India’s contested boundaries with China along the 3500 km Line of Actual Control is with the Tibetan Autonomous Region in Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh states. Four years after China completed the territorial takeover of Tibet, in 1954, New Delhi signed an agreement with Peking (now Beijing), agreeing to recognise Tibet as "Tibet region of China".

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In 1959, following the Tibetan uprising, the Dalai Lama (spiritual leader of Tibetan people) and many of his followers fled to India.

A Tibetan government in-exile functions from Dharamsala in India's Himachal Pradesh state.

What the Safeguard Defenders report says on exit bans

The exit bans are usually enforced by Beijing "through passport denial and confiscation," Gardner said while referring to Beijing's deployment of ethnicity-based controls.

The group estimates that "tens of thousands" of Chinese are banned from exit at any one time. It also cites a 2022 academic paper by Chris Carr and Jack Wroldsen that found 128 cases of foreigners being exit-banned between 1995 and 2019, including 29 Americans and 44 Canadians.

The report cites estimates by human rights groups that said that at least 14 million people were affected by exit bans in China in 2015.

How China prevents ethnic groups from exiting the country

China has a two-track system for issuing passport since 2002.

The fast-track system for issuing passports is predominantly deployed in the Han-majority areas and is tasked with handling passport applications and renewals within 15 days of application.

In the so-called autonomous regions, such as Buddhist-populated Tibet and Uyghur-populated Xinjiang, a much-slower system that involves at least seven levels of gatekeeping is deployed for issuing passports.

"In this much more cumbersome system, passport applications could take years, that is if they are approved at all," Safeguard Defenders report said.

Why does China prevent Tibetans, Uyghurs from leaving the country?

The Safeguard Defenders report said that the discriminatory policy was partly designed to prevent travel for religious reasons.

"For example, stopping Tibetan Buddhists from attending teachings of the Dalai Lama in India and Muslims, such as Uyghurs and Hui, from making pilgrimages to Mecca in Saudi Arabia," the report said.

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