Argument: Tibet has enjoyed independence for the vast majority of its long history

Supporting quotes

• Michael C. van Walt, an international legal scholar and a board member of the International Campaign for Tibet. “Tibet File No.18: The Legal Status of Tibet”. Cultural Survival Quarterly (Vol. 12, 1988) – “In the course of Tibet’s 2,000-year history, the country came under a degree of foreign influence only for short periods of time in the 13th and 18th centuries. Few independent countries today can claim as impressive a record. As the ambassador to Ireland at the UN remarked during the General Assembly debates on the question of Tibet, “[f]or thousands of years, or for a couple of thousand of years at any rate, [Tibet] was as free and as fully in control of its own affairs as any nation in this Assembly, and a thousand times more free to look after its own affairs than many of the nations here.”