Tenzin Nyidon
DHARAMSHALA, Jan. 13: As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney prepares for an official visit to China from January 13 to 17, 2026, a coalition of human rights groups and civil society organisations in Canada has issued robust appeals urging Ottawa to elevate human rights concerns alongside trade and diplomacy during talks with the Chinese leadership.
Carney’s visit, the first by a Canadian prime minister since 2017, is widely understood in Ottawa to be a strategic attempt to reset bilateral relations, expand trade opportunities, and diversify Canada’s economic partnerships beyond a heavy reliance on the United States.
However, Canadian human rights advocates argue that economic engagement cannot be allowed to overshadow serious human rights abuses, which they say are being committed by the Chinese government, both within China and in its treatment of minorities and critics abroad.
In a statement released on the eve of Carney’s departure, the Tibet Action Institute (TAI) urged the prime minister to directly raise the issue of China’s residential boarding school system in Tibet with President Xi Jinping.
The institute warned that China’s extensive network of state-run residential schools in Tibet forces Tibetan children to separate from their families, language, religion and culture, likening these policies to a form of cultural erasure. According to TAI, an estimated one million Tibetan children have been placed in these institutions, with nearly 78 percent of those aged six to 18 and tens of thousands of preschool-age children affected. The group asserts that these policies pose “an existential threat to the survival of Tibetans as a distinct people.”
TAI emphasised that Canada’s own painful history with its residential school system gives the government a unique moral obligation to oppose similar practices elsewhere and to link economic engagement with principled diplomacy.
In tandem with TAI’s appeal, a coalition of at least nine Canadian human rights organisations, including the Canadian Coalition on Human Rights in China, Canada Tibet Committee, Amnesty International Canada, and others, issued an open letter to Prime Minister Carney urging him to confront a broader spectrum of human rights violations during his discussions in Beijing.
The letter highlighted what coalition members describe as a marked worsening of human rights conditions in China, pointing to a broad range of concerns including the detention and prosecution of Hong Kong media magnate Jimmy Lai amid the erosion of the rule of law in Hong Kong; the continued imprisonment of Uyghur-Canadian activist Huseyin Celil and other individuals with deep family ties to Canada whom the coalition says remain unjustly detained; and the ongoing persecution of ethnic and religious minorities such as Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and Christians, whose freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion are severely restricted. The letter further draws attention to what it describes as systematic harassment and influence operations targeting civil society groups and diaspora communities within Canada by agents linked to the Chinese state, urging Ottawa to confront these “illegal activities” directly and decisively.
The letter insists that Canada must clearly articulate that Chinese diplomats or agents engaged in such conduct will be expelled and that Canada’s approach to human rights should be coherent and strategic, rather than “ad hoc or uncoordinated.”
