At Chongqing meeting, Brussels also expected to raise its concerns about situations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong amid high bilateral tensions.
In an unexpected turn amid high bilateral tensions, European Union officials are to visit Tibet this month as a side outing to their annual human-rights dialogue with China.
The dialogue will take place on June 16 in Chongqing, an EU spokeswoman confirmed.
Brussels is understood to have requested a field visit to the Tibet autonomous region to examine human-rights conditions there, having given Beijing the names of some prisons it hoped to see.
“As it stands now, a side visit to Tibet is also being organised by the Chinese authorities for a small group of officials from the European External Action Service who follow human rights issues,” said Nabila Massrali, the bloc’s foreign affairs spokeswoman.
The EU team will be led by Paola Pampaloni, the second-in-command on its Asia desk within the union’s diplomatic corps.
Brussels can be expected to raise the many concerns it has about human rights in China, including hot-button issues in Tibet, the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Hong Kong.
The Tibet trip will be sure to raise eyebrows. It is rare for a European delegation to be granted access to the secluded region. For years, Brussels has pummelled Beijing for breaching human rights there.
Last year, in a statement to mark human rights day, the EU pointed to practices including “obligatory boarding schooling and DNA sampling” as “further indications of the dire human-rights situation”.
“The EU continues to call for meaningful, unrestricted and unsupervised access by independent international experts, foreign journalists and diplomats to Tibet, Xinjiang and elsewhere in China,” the statement read.
