As Bhutan’s prime minister Tshering Tobgay tours Europe this week seeking investments in the “Gelephu Mindfulness City” mega-project, European leaders should urge him to release the 30 remaining political prisoners from his country’s notorious jails.
The 30 men have been held in cruel conditions for decades, after convictions for “treason” following unfair trials that included torture, with no access to a defense lawyer. In March, a UN committee examined a sample of cases, found that their detention is unlawful, and urged their release. Several are in very poor health, and one died recently in custody. Prisoners’ relatives said that only those who can somehow pay for them receive even basic medicines such as paracetamol.
Their cases date back to the period before Bhutan’s 2008 democratic reforms. In 1990, 90,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese were stripped of citizenship and expelled from the country amid widespread state violence. Several of the prisoners are accused of participating in protests at that time. Other cases relate to alleged membership of the Druk National Congress, a banned pro-democracy group. The most recent ones originated in early 2008, when a group of young men who had grown up as refugees in Nepal were arrested after they entered Bhutan to campaign for their right to return.
Most were sentenced to life in prison without parole, and can only be released if the king commutes their sentence.
King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck could end the unjust suffering of these prisoners and their families with a stroke of a pen. Both he and his father have done so before, but political prisoners’ families say the king’s office has told them not to even bother applying for clemency.
On January 26, Tobgay will attend a business forum in Brussels hosted by Jozef Síkela, EU commissioner for international partnerships, before traveling on for meetings in Frankfurt and Prague.
Commissioner Síkela, other officials meeting the prime minister, and European investors who are thinking of buying into Bhutan’s vision of “mindfulness” and “harmony” should look beyond the glossy marketing, and use their leverage to press for the release of the political prisoners brutally held in the “kingdom of happiness.”
