ABOUT 1 million Tibetan children in China have been separated from their families and placed in state-run boarding schools, forcing their assimilation into the dominant Chinese culture, three independent United Nations human rights experts said on Monday.

'We are very disturbed that, in recent years, the residential school system for Tibetan children appears to act as a mandatory large-scale program intended to assimilate Tibetans into [China's] majority Han culture, contrary to international human rights standards,' special rapporteurs Fernand de Varennes, Farida Shaheed and Alexandra Xanthaki said in a statement.