Up to late yesterday, authorities in Tibet had not acceded to a request by Mrs Mary Robinson for a meeting with a 69-year-old dissident monk who is on parole after 27 years in prison and said to be under effective house arrest in the capital, Lhasa.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights asked for the meeting on Thursday at the start of a two-day visit to the Tibet autonomous region of China. She leaves this morning for Shanghai.
Mrs Robinson was told the authorities did not know where the monk was, according to her spokesman, Mr Jose Diaz. However, a lama at the Jokhang, the temple in Lhasa which is the spiritual heart of Buddhist Tibet, told Mrs Robinson on Thursday he believed the monk, Yulo Dawa Tsering, was living in the city.
A group of MEPs who met the dissident over a year ago said he had been placed under house arrest after speaking to a UN human rights rapporteur about ill-treatment in prison.
The Human Rights Commissioner did not ask to visit any prisons in Tibet. She said in an interview with Reuters by telephone from Lhasa that this was not part of her brief though she would raise individual cases of human rights abuses in Tibet.
Yesterday Mrs Robinson met officials from the Tibet departments responsible for religious and ethnic affairs, culture and planning. Her spokesman said she handed authorities an aide memoire on the implementation of UN treaties China has signed on torture, arbitrary detention and the rights of the child.
Meanwhile, as she prepares to discuss the human rights situation in China with President Jiang Zemin on Monday, a Hong Kong human rights group has said it has evidence that China might let dissidents establish a pro-democracy opposition party.
The Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China claimed that a Chinese official in the city of Jinan in eastern Shandong province had told two dissidents trying to register the Chinese Democratic Party that Beijing was considering this step, which would be a major advance in political rights in a country ruled by the communist party since 1949.
This would be a "major breakthrough over the ban on opposition parties," the group said. "But whether Beijing is really lifting the ban in earnest, or just doing something for Mrs Robinson to see, remains to be seen."