Shareholders are concerned that Thermo Fisher Scientific (“the Company”) has signed sales agreements with police forces in occupied Tibet to supply Human Identification (HID) products. Two reports have been published outlining how authorities across Tibet have collected DNA from as many as 1.2 million Tibetans - including children as young as 5 years old without consent from their parents. [1]
Tibet is a repressive policing environment, where ‘criminal activity’ includes criticizing the government, owning a picture of the Dalai Lama or teaching the Tibetan language to children. Engaging in these activities routinely results in detention and torture of Tibetans by the police.
The police in Tibet are accountable only to the Chinese Communist Party, with no free media, civil society or international observers to place checks on their conduct. As such, it appears impossible that Thermo Fisher can guarantee how the police will use its equipment once it reaches Tibet.
Since October 2022 representatives of impacted communities have written to the Company five times to raise concerns of the use of the Company’s HID products by law enforcement in Tibet. Shareholders also raised the issue at the 2023 AGM. The company has responded, but not engaged with the key issues that police in occupied Tibet cannot be trusted to only use this DNA equipment for standard criminal investigations, and that they are engaged in an ethnically targeted program of DNA collection. Despite repeated requests, the Company has to date refused to meet with stakeholders.
There is evidence of state-run DNA harvesting across China [2], and the Company recognized the possibility of its products being used in human rights violations, which prompted it, “consistent with its values, ethics code, and policies,” to cease “any new sales of HID products to Xinjiang Public Security Bureaus (PSBs) in March of 2019.”