American firm's products may have contributed to China's abuse of Tibetan People: US panel

US firm Thermo Fisher is reported to have sold DNA kits and replacement parts for sequencers directly to Police Force in Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR).

WASHINGTON: Four members of the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) recently wrote a letter expressing concern to a US-based Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. that the company's products may have contributed to the Chinese government's abuse of Tibetan People. Thermo Fisher is reported to have sold DNA kits and replacement parts for sequencers directly to Police Force in Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) to enable mass surveillance and human rights abuses, Tibet Press reported.

"We are writing to express our concerns that your company`s DNA kits and replacement parts for sequencers were sold directly to the police in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) in the People's Republic of China (PRC. Sales of replacement parts imply that security authorities in the TAR already possess your company's DNA sequencers as well," Commissioners from the bipartisan and bicameral CECC said in a letter to Marc Casper, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Thermo Fisher Scientific, posted on CECC website.

In the letter, the CECC commissioners posed several questions for Casper to answer about use of Thermo Fisher's products in China, including whether the company would consider a "blanket prohibition on all sales of its products to the People's Republic of China in order to assure its shareholders and the American public that its products cannot be used in the commitment of human rights abuses in that country?"

"There are so few safeguards for how DNA is gathered and used in the PRC that we are alarmed that U.S. companies, including Thermo Fisher Scientific, may be wittingly or unwittingly aiding or abetting human rights abuses," the letter read, citing September 2022 report by Toronto-based Citizen Lab which found that between June 2016 and August 2022 police in the TAR collected between roughly 900,000 and 1.2 million DNA samples.

In this case, CECC commissioners said the targeting of Tibetans is particularly troubling, as the Tibetan people have been subject to successive, and sometimes brutal, campaigns of repression and social control over the decades.

"Two recent studies have documented evidence of mass collection of DNA from residents in the TAR. A September 2022 report by Human Rights Watch identified DNA collection drives in 14 distinct localities across the seven prefecture-level areas of the TAR. Blood samples were systematically collected from children at kindergartens and from other local residents, and available information suggested the collection was involuntary and that evidence of criminal conduct was not required for collection," the letter continued.

Likewise, the Citizen Lab report referenced above found that police collected DNA samples from roughly a quarter to a third of the population of the TAR. Citizen Lab's analysis determined that the activity was not apparently related to any criminal activity and that police targeted men, women, and children for DNA collection.

Last month, a group of legislators from 15 legislatures globally called on their respective governments to investigate and suspend commercial activities with companies providing the Chinese government with technologies to carry out biometric surveillance in the Uyghur region, Tibet and elsewhere in China.

"We, members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), write to express our deep concern at the use of mass DNA collection by the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) to enhance its surveillance on minorities, especially in the Tibetan and Uyghur regions," two dozen Parliamentarians said in a joint letter.

According to IPAC, investigations have revealed that at least one American company, Thermo Fisher, is known to be supplying DNA profiling kits to police in the TAR. In a statement, the IPAC said that the mass DNA collection campaign in Tibet and Xinjiang constitutes an interference with the right to privacy and human rights and represents a form of social control directed against Tibetan people.