Palden Gyatso

Palden Gyatso "Born in a Tibetan village in 1933, Palden Gyatso had the opportunity as a young man to study at the renowned Deprung Monastery. Gyatso was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1950, two years after the Chinese invasion of Tibet. In 1959, he was arrested, tortured, and sent to Panam Dzong Prison on trumped-up charges of resisting Chinese occupation and spying for India; at this time, many other monks were also incarcerated or executed as political reactionaries. Gyatso would remain in Chinese prisons and labor camps for the next thirty-three years... Gyatso was eventually released from captivity in 1992. He escaped across the Himalayas into India, smuggling Chinese torture instruments as material proof of human rights abuses in Tibet. Since then, he has traveled widely to publicize the plight of Tibet's political prisoners; in 1995 he gave evidence at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. He has also written a memoir, published in English in 1997 as The Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk, in which Gyatso elegantly bears witness to the physical and mental anguish endured by Tibetan political prisoners, proudly upholds the resilience of the human spirit, and pays tribute to Tibetan culture's proud endurance under conditions of cultural genocide."

A member of the international council of Human Rights Foundation.

On May 4, 2006, he spoke at a Laogai Research Foundation conference.