Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon on 7 March (HL2663), whether they have made any estimate of the number of camps, including the so-called anti-extremism centres and re-education camps, in (1) Tibet and (2) the rest of China.

The Government refers to credible external estimates, in particular those from the United Nations, of numbers of individuals in China detained under various circumstances and within certain geographies. For example, the April 2023 UN Special Procedures found "[h]undreds of thousands of Tibetans have reportedly been 'transferred' from their traditional rural lives to low-skilled and low-paid employment since 2015" noting "the labour transfer programme is facilitated by a network of 'vocational training centres', which focus less on developing professional skills and more on cultural and political indoctrination in a militarised environment." As noted in the Government's response to Written Question HL2663, with regard to the situation in Xinjiang, in 2018 the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination estimated "upwards of a million people were being held in so-called counter-extremism centres and another two million had been forced into what the Chinese refer to as 're-education camps' for political and cultural indoctrination."