I am not able to comment on the substance of Nentwig’s observations, but for someone familiar with China it is reasonable to suppose that the human rights situation for most Tibetans is no better and no worse than for anybody else in China. As a „minority“, they are allowed to have more children and have some preferential education quotas compared to Han Chinese. Their displacement by Han Chinese migrants, which is typically depicted in the West as deliberate state policy, is much more likely to be the result of the same kind of entrepreneurial migration as one sees anywhere in China where tourism booms. It is often said that state employees are keen to go to Tibet because they get an additional „hardship“ allowance there. This may attract some people, but a classmate of my wife’s who ended up in the military once told her that it was the unfortunate kids without connections who end up in „New Zealand“ (a Chinese pun: Xin Xilan, with Xin standing for Xinjiang, Xi for Xizang, i.e. TIbet, and Lan for Lanzhou, a remote northwestern city). Surely no liberal logic can suggest that Han Chinese should be prohibited from settling in Tibet, even if it means that they control all the business. At most, one could argue for some kind of affirmative action in employment (which I think exists) or aid to ethnic-Tibetan businesses (note that recently the Chinese government has allowed a few such aid projects by international NGOs, though outside Tibet proper. It is likely that this will now stop.)

Of course, this argument only works if one accepts that Tibet is part of China. So it is true that the dominant Western view of Tibetan human rights essentially hinges upon it being seen as an illegally occupied country.