The scope of this investigation was initially to find and identify suspected detention facilities in Tibet.
This then grew to a much more ambitious project, mapping out the prison system across the whole of China.
There are very few online resources discussing this topic, and while there are several websites for advocacy campaigns, none of them have a complete database of publicly available coordinates. Therefore, an objective is to broaden the understanding of detention across the whole region. Geolocating and verifying these prison locations is necessary because most known (Tibetan) prisons are in and around Lhasa, but there is little to no information about prisons outside the capital city.
The goal is not to identify the goings-on inside the prisons which may or may not be breaching human rights. Instead, it will take a broader look at identifying all prisons to provide a foundation for other researchers to further investigate and verify stories of detention of Tibetan and Chinese citizens by the Chinese Communist Party, and possible/potential human rights violations in said detention centres.
The hope is that it closes a gap in the current research that lacks this vital information to assist current and future researchers in this area/on this topic.
Primary Goals:
- Assign coordinates to every detention centre and prison in Tibet and other provinces in China.
- Match known prisons to coordinates and verifying through geolocation.
- Close the gap in the current published research on the subject.
Secondary Goals:
- Ensure all research is accessible and verifiable through open source means.
- Provide a dataset which can be adapted and improved upon for future research.
- Provide the open source investigation and journalism community with a large-scale project to develop OSINT skills and experience.
One point of clarification which should be made from the outset is that the findings in this report should be considered on a per facility basis. Early in the research, it was decided that this project’s sole reliance would be on open source content. It is hoped that future research using human sources can be combined with the findings to produce a much more comprehensive picture of the situation.
The project aims to be extensive but not exhaustive due to its mostly single-individual management and limited resources.
This initial release will focus specifically on Tibet and the data will be carried forward for future versions which will include additional regions with host large Tibetan populations, and then the rest of China.
