Tibetan Exile MPs Sworn in Amid Political Controversy

Newly elected members of Tibet’s India-based exile parliament were sworn into office in two separate groups on June 8, with each group now denouncing the other’s oaths as invalid, Tibetan sources say. During the oath-taking ceremony, 21 MPs took their oath of office from a temporary speaker of the parliament while 22 took their oath before a portrait of Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

All had been elected in an April 11 election held in Tibetan communities worldwide that saw former parliamentary speaker Penpa Tsering voted in as political leader, or Sikyong, of the Dharamsala, India-based Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), Tibet’s government in exile. Following the ceremony, though, the CTA’s Election Commission disqualified the oaths taken by the second group, with that group still refusing to take its oaths before the pro-tem speaker, Dawa Tsering, saying Tsering had taken his own oath of office before a formerly ousted Chief Justice now occupying his post, they said, unlawfully.

Speaking on June 15 in an RFA TV talk show, Dawa Phunkyi—a member representing Tibet’s historical region of U-Tsang who took his oath before the pro-tem speaker Dawa Tsering—said that a solution to what is now being called a constitutional crisis in the Tibetan exile community remains uncertain.

Read more