Melody in Prison: Ngawang Choephel
	UPDATE 6 April 1998

Human Rights Watch has provided British Prime Minister Tony Blair with the names of ten Chinese and Tibetan prisoners–among them Ngawang Choepel–about whose health and whereabouts the Chinese provided "wholly inadequate" information in a recent "dialogue" between representatives of the European Union and the People's Republic of China. In the cases of Ngawang (location unknown) and Liu Nanchun (a labor activist imprisoned in a labor camp), no information whatsoever was supplied by the PRC. HRW urged Blair to obtain meaningful information about these prisoners and to obtain immediate access to Gendun Choekyi Nyima, the nine-year-old Panchen Lama detained by the Chinese in an unknown location since 1995, in the forthcoming EU-Chinese summit. HRW further urged Blair to use the summit to define concrete benchmarks for human rights improvements in China and Tibet and asked that Foreign Secretary Robin Cook make public any further lists of prisoners supplied to Beijing so that independent groups could obtain information about the prisoners' whereabouts and welfare.