cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/49410921
Tibet’s global freedom score is zero for the third year in a row, according to the Freedom in the World 2026 report released by the watchdog group Freedom House on March 19, and Tibet remains “not free.”
In Freedom House’s 2026 profile of Tibet, which is based on conditions and data from 2025, Tibet has a political rights score of –2 out of a possible 40 and a civil liberties score of 2 out of a possible 60, combining for an overall score of 0 out of 100.
Tibet’s score of 0 ties with South Sudan for second lowest on the list of 208 areas examined. The DPRK, with a score of 3 out of 100, ranks higher on Freedom House’s index. Tibet scored a zero in the 2024 and 2025 reports, breaking an 8-year trend of scoring 1 overall and underscoring the continued worsening human rights situation within Tibet.
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Tibet’s score reflects the codification of continuing repression by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the “Ethnic Unity and Progress Law,” which remained under consideration as of December 2025 and was enacted on March 12.
The law officially targets ethnic and religious minorities for assimilation, aiming to erase minority languages by mandating that children learn in Chinese (usually through state-run boarding schools) and promoting President Xi Jinping’s Sinicization goal throughout China.
China’s state-run boarding schools … have rapidly expanded in recent years, separating Tibetan schoolchildren from their families and stripping them of access to their Tibetan culture, language and identity.
The PRC’s Ethnic Unity law reverses long-standing CCP domestic and international commitments to recognizing the distinct culture and tradition of minority groups. The new Law directly undermines the Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy, which enshrined the rights of Tibetans to manage their own internal affairs, and removes legal protections for translations of legal and government documents.
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