Chinese persecution of Falun Gong: US Dept. Report

Oct. 26, 2009: The US State Dept’s Report on International Religious Freedom concerning China comments on the brutal treatment of the Falun Gong:

2009 report on religious freedom in China --

According to Falun Gong practitioners abroad, since 1999 several hundreds of thousands of practitioners have been detained for engaging in Falun Gong practices, admitting that they adhere to the teachings of Falun Gong, or refusing to criticize the organization or its founder. The organization reported its members have been subject to excessive force, abuse, rape, detention, forcible psychiatric commitment and treatment (including involuntary medication and electric shock treatment), and torture, and that some members, including children, have died in custody. Practitioners who refused to recant their beliefs were sometimes subjected to extrajudicial “legal education” centers after the expiration of their criminal sentences. According to former RTL camp detainees, Falun Gong practitioners make up a significant percentage of the RTL camps’ population.

Overseas Falun Gong organizations alleged a surge in arrests and deaths of Falun Gong practitioners carried out to prevent disturbances during the Olympic Games. They claimed that authorities arrested thousands of adherents and imprisoned hundreds, and that 100 practitioners died in 2008 as a result of persecution. Reports of abuse were difficult to confirm because the Government prevented Falun Gong members from meeting with foreign reporters and government officials. These organizations also reported that the Government harassed their members in other countries, including the United States, through threatening phone calls and physical harassment. The Government frequently used harsh rhetoric against Falun Gong. In May 2009, several attorneys who had represented Falun Gong practitioners did not have their licenses renewed by the Lawyers Associations in their localities.

In April 2009, Zhang Xingwu, a retired physics professor from Shandong Province, was sentenced to seven years in prison after police found Falun Gong literature in his apartment.

In November 2009, a Shanghai court sentenced Liu Jin to three and a half years in prison for downloading from the Internet and distributing to others information about Falun Gong.

In December 2009, Bu Dongwei left the country after serving two and a half years at a re-education through labor facility; he maintained that he was tortured because of his Falun Gong activities. Before his arrest, he worked for The Asia Foundation, a U.S.-based organization.

Falun Gong Founder Awarded for 'Outstanding Spiritual Leadership'

NTDTV: 2009-10-6 10:15

The Asia-Pacific Human Rights Foundation gives annual awards to individuals who are making a difference. On September 26, they gave a special award to the founder of Falun Gong. Albert Roman in Los Angeles has the story.

A packed ballroom of over 200 human rights defenders and supporters joined the Asia-Pacific Human Rights Foundation awards ceremony to acknowledge the efforts of nine individuals Saturday evening. Among them was Mr. Li Hongzhi, the founder of the Falun Gong spiritual practice.

Eight of the awards were given for outstanding work in the field of human rights. Among the recipients was Christian Pastor Eddie Romero, who was arrested in China in 2008 during the Olympics for protesting the Chinese regime’s human rights abuses. Dr. Yang Jianli, a Harvard Fellow and 2005 award recipient, also attended the event. Dr. Yang had been jailed for 5 years for helping Chinese labor unions employ non-violent strategies to advocate for their rights.

The award for “Outstanding Spiritual Leadership” was given to Mr. Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong. Last year’s recipient was the Dalai Lama.

Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, is a practice that includes exercises, meditation, and a moral discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

In 1999, China’s communist ruler Jiang Zemin launched a campaign to persecute Falun Gong practitioners, sending tens of thousands to labor camps. Amnesty International notes that Falun Gong is among the most severely persecuted groups in China.

The Asia-Pacific Human Rights Foundation found it noteworthy that throughout these past 10 years, Falun Gong practitioners have maintained a strictly peaceful approach to ending the persecution.

Youfu Li, chairman of the U.S. Southwestern Falun Dafa Association, accepted the award on Mr. Li Hongzhi’s behalf.

[Youfu Li, US Southwestern Falun Dafa Association]:
Youfu Li said, “Mr. Li Hongzhi taught the principles of truthfulness, compassion, tolerance around the world. He helped improved people’s morality. Over the past 10 years the Communist Party has persecuted many people. Falun Gong practitioners have used compassion to expose the Chinese Communist Party.”

Christian Pastor Eddie Romero had this to say about Mr. Li Hongzhi’s award:

[Pastor Eddie Romero]:
“I’m excited to be able to stand there and also to receive along with the Falun Gong leader the awards, because again, we’re standing on the same side of this issue, and to me, it’s important that we stand shoulder to shoulder on this issue and not become fractured over it because I’m not a Falun Gong member and I know he’s not a Christian, but we share this together because we’re sisters and brothers whether they’re Falun Gong or House Christians.”

Labor union advocate Dr. Yang Jianli also commented on the award.

[Dr. Yang Jianli, President of Initiatives for China]:
“I’m glad to learn that Mr. Li Hongzhi won this award, and I think he deserves this award. In the past 10 years, Falun Gong represents the most persecuted group in China. In this sense, I think Mr. Li deserves this award.”

The ceremony Saturday evening was a chance for individuals, human rights organizations, and Christian groups to unite, share ideas, and encourage each other to continue their pursuit of freedom for the Chinese people.

Albert Roman, NTD News, Los Angeles.

Oct 1, 2009 4:13 | Updated Oct 1, 2009 5:30

Court backs students in TAU row over Falun Gong exhibit the university removed

By ABE SELIG

Jerusalem Post: A Tel Aviv District Court judge on Wednesday ruled that Tel Aviv University had "violated freedom of expression and succumbed to pressure from the Chinese Embassy" when it took down a student exhibition last year that focused on the oppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement at the hands of the Communist Chinese government.

The exhibition, which featured 25 paintings by 17 artists from around the world, depicted Falun Gong spiritual practices and the torture and executions its members have reportedly been subjected to in recent years.

The movement, which is based on an ancient Chinese meditation method that aims to bring its practitioners to higher spiritual enlightenment, was outlawed in China in 1999. Some of the artists, who are survivors of China's hard labor camps, had endured the very tortures portrayed in the paintings.

The exhibition was originally approved by the head of the Asian Studies department at TAU, Prof. Yoav Ariel, along with the university's administration, which allotted nearly two weeks in March 2008, for the presenters to show the paintings inside the central on-campus library.

But after just two days, organizers were told that the exhibition had to be removed. After initially protesting the move, they were given an additional three days to hold the exhibition, but were then told it had to come down.

The two students who had organized the exhibition, Yaniv Nitzan and Itay Tamuz, were incensed, and claimed that the decision to shut down the exhibition had been made after TAU was pressured by the Chinese Embassy in Tel Aviv, the two took the matter to court.

Nitzan and Tamuz filed the petition against both TAU and the university's student union, both of whom appear as defendants on the court documents. According to a student union member close to the case, the pair had been under the impression that because the student union had refused to take sides in the matter until a legal ruling was issued, it, too, opposed the exhibition.

Nonetheless, after more than a year of legal battles, Judge Amiram Benyamini ruled on Wednesday that TAU had

"succumbed to pressure from the Chinese Embassy, which funds various activities at the university, and took down the exhibit, violating [the students'] freedom of expression."

Benyamini also stipulated as part of his ruling that the exhibition be given another week to be shown, and ordered TAU to pay some NIS 45,000 for the students' court costs.

TAU declined to comment on the matter Wednesday afternoon, and a spokesman at the Chinese Embassy refused to comment, telling The Jerusalem Post that it was "a holiday" before hanging up the phone.

The TAU student union, however, which was not affected by the ruling, issued a response expressing its solidarity with the students, and called on the university to "encourage pluralism and freedom of expression amongst the student body."

"As part of this, the student union will assist the organizers in their efforts to present the exhibition on campus. From the moment that the university decided to do away will the exhibition, the union waited for the legal ruling of the court. After receiving the judge's ruling, we are now standing with the students who initiated the exhibition, and will assist them in any way they might need to present the exhibition anew."

(video) China Review: 60 Years of Killing

Compliments of Status of Chinese People Blog. Many Thanks!

This is the seventh of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, Video by NTDTV via Youtube -

Video part 2

Foreword

The 55-year history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is written with blood and lies. The stories behind this bloody history are both extremely tragic and rarely known. Under the rule of the CCP, 60 to 80 million innocent Chinese people have been killed, leaving their broken families behind. Many people wonder why the CCP kills. While the CCP continues its brutal persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and recently suppressed protesting crowds in Hanyuan with gunshots, people wonder whether they will ever see the day when the CCP will learn to speak with words rather than guns.

Mao Zedong summarized the purpose of the Cultural Revolution, “…after the chaos the world reaches peace, but in 7 or 8 years, the chaos needs to happen again.” [1] In other words, there should be a political revolution every 7 or 8 years and a crowd of people needs to be killed every 7 or 8 years.

A supporting ideology and practical requirements lie behind the CCP’s slaughters.

Ideologically, the CCP believes in the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Therefore, after the CCP took over China, it killed the landowners to resolve problems with production relationships in rural areas. It killed the capitalists to reach the goal of commercial and industrial reform and solve the production relationships in the cities. After these two classes were eliminated, the problems related to the economic base were basically solved. Similarly, solving the problems related to the superstructure [2] also called for slaughter. The suppressions of the Hu Feng Anti-Party Group [3] and the Anti-Rightists Movement eliminated the intellectuals. Killing the Christians, Taoists, Buddhists and popular folk groups solved the problem of religions. Mass murders during the Cultural Revolution established, culturally and politically, the CCP’s absolute leadership. The Tiananmen Square massacre was used to prevent political crisis and squelch democratic demands. The persecution of Falun Gong is meant to resolve the issues of belief and traditional healing. These actions were all necessary for the CCP to strengthen its power and maintain its rule in the face of continual financial crisis (prices for consumer goods skyrocketed after the CCP took power and China’s economy almost collapsed after the Cultural Revolution), political crisis (some people not following the Party’s orders or some others wanting to share political rights with the Party) and crisis of belief (the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, political changes in Eastern Europe, and the Falun Gong issue). Except for the Falun Gong issue, almost all the foregoing political movements were utilized to revive the evil specter of the CCP and incite its desire for revolution. The CCP also used these political movements to test CCP members, eliminating those who did not meet the Party’s requirements……. (more details)

Video part 2

FORUM ON CHINA: Vancouver, Sept. 27, 2009

60 Years of Communist Dictatorship

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule in China, the Simon Fraser University China Research Society invites everyone to participate in a Forum on China. With China well on the way to becoming a major world power, experts and scholars will come together to analyze China’s current situation and review the Party’s 60-year reign.

Will China’s version of Communism survive unbridled capitalism? Will the Party itself survive? If the regime continues to allow rampant pollution of China’s air, land, and water, what does the future hold for the Chinese people? And what about China's egregious human rights record, including religious repression and persecution?

Find out more by joining in the discussion on Sunday, September 27 at 1: 30 pm at SFU Downtown Campus. Admission is free.

PANELISTS:

China Expert Clive Ansley

Clive Ansley has practiced law in Vancouver, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. He now heads up Ansley and Company, based in Courtney, British Columbia.

Author Sheng Xue

Sheng Xue grew up in Beijing. Since coming to Canada in 1989 she has worked for a number of Chinese media, winning many awards for her investigative journalism.

Lawyer Guo Guoting

Guo Guoting is a human rights lawyer from China who defended prisoners of conscience. He came to Canada in 2005.

Venue: Room 1700, Labatt Hall, SFU Downtown Campus
515 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC

Look here for a news report from Epoch Times:

Experts Review 60 Years of Red China

End religious persecution, families of jailed Falun Gong believers beg government

Vancouver woman pleads for release of daughter, who has spent nearly two and a half years in jail

By Richard J. Dalton Jr., Vancouver Sun September 21, 2009; also published on MWC and CFP.

A Vancouver woman who says her daughter has been persecuted and detained in China for practising Falun Gong called Sunday for the Chinese government to release her daughter.

Du Huiqing said her daughter, Yang Jinyan, 56, has been arrested seven times and has spent two years and five months in prison in three separate incidents. She hasn't heard from her daughter, a Chinese citizen who is from Zhongshan City, in a month.

"For 10 years, she has been arrested and released, arrested and released," Huiqing said through a translator. "She's been persecuted for so long by the government."

Meanwhile, two other practitioners of the religion -- sisters who fled China and came to Canada as refugees in May -- also appealed Sunday for an end to the persecution. They called for the release of their brother, who began serving a 10-year sentence in 2002 for practising the religion.

Sue Zhang, spokeswoman for the Falun Dafa Association of Vancouver, said the mother and two sisters decided to go public Sunday so politicians and the public would pressure the Chinese government.

Zhang said the Chinese government estimates that 70 million to 100 million Chinese residents practise Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa. She said that's more than the 60 million members of the Communist Party. She said the Communist Party sees Falun Gong as a threat and banned its practice in 1999.

Zhang released the arrest papers of Jinyan, which according to the translation, say she was arrested July 15 for "suspicion of organizing and using an evil cult to destroy the execution of the law."

Huiqing said she and her husband Yang Huanwen, both 86 years old and 30-year residents of Vancouver, want to see their daughter before they die. She said the two are having trouble eating and sleeping.

"I really hope my daughter can be out of jail," Huiqing said. "I am too old to go back to visit her, so I really hope she can be here and we can have a family reunion."

In the other case, the two sisters said they never knew the religion would lead to such persecution in China.

Jing Cai, who was an administrative assistant in a bookstore, came across a book on the religion in 1995, began practising it and introduced the religion to her sister Jing Tian. Both were attracted by the religion's promise of truth, compassion and benevolence, Cai said.

In July 1999, they heard that 45 practitioners were arrested in Beijing, and the two sisters travelled to the city on a nine-hour train trip from their town of Shengyang, appealing for the release of those arrested in a peaceful demonstration with 10,000 others.

In October 1999, the sisters appealed in Beijing again, unfurling a banner in Tiananmen Square.

Ever since they began protesting, the police infiltrated their practice of the religion, showing up at gatherings undercover, and the government has persecuted them, both sisters said through a translator. They have been arrested, imprisoned, brainwashed and sent to labour camps, the two said.

Tian said the police have asked her to sign documents avowing she would not practise the religion.

The police came to Tian's workplace, "so my boss was very afraid," Tian said.

They said their brother, Jing Yu, is being held in a labour camp, and appealed for his release.

"We're trying to stop the persecution," Zhang said. "Their goal is to appeal, have their voice heard."

Korea’s Repatriation of Chinese Refugees Raises Concerns

By Wang Jiahui
Epoch Times Staff Aug 13, 2009 and BBC

SEOUL— Following the repatriation of three Falun Gong refugees in July, South Korean government is said to be planning to deport two other Falun Gong practitioners to China. Critiques say the repatriation violates the Refugee Agreement and the United Nations Convention against Torture, both of which Korea ratified.

The two Falun Gong practitioners, now detained in the Cheong-Ju City Detention Center, were earlier denied their refugee applications. Due to the on-going persecution of Falun Gong in China, they were not able to go back to China to obtain documents for the application. But one of the practitioners was told that the real reason for the rejection of their applications was “pressure from above.”

Another source confirmed that the recent sudden repatriations were not ordered by the Minister of Justice, but by higher authorities. The deported Falun Gong practitioners and their supporters suspect the Chinese communist regime is behind the repatriations.

The Korean government’s apparent submission to China has raised concerns among the Korean people; a businessman who identified himself as Mr. Kim said the repatriation was a wrong decision. “As a democratic country, we should protect the Falun Gong practitioners,” Kim said. “The government’s decision [of repatriation] is a step backward for our democracy. All Korean people should unite to correct this mistake.”

A Korean finance professional named Park said it is inhumane to send people back to persecution. “Though Korea is doing business with China, it is absolutely wrong for the Korean government to yield to political pressure and force the refugees back to China,” he said, after learning about the case.

Read the original Chinese article.

China's Deadly Harvest

July 20th - China's Deadly Harvest by NTDTV

2009-7-15 0:31280

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Numbers are symbols; they represent anything and everything. But they also hide what they represent, like a mask. In ten years, the names of over 3,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been collected; they are the names of people who have been killed through torture by Chinese authorities. But, how many more people simply disappeared after the persecution began? And what is the connection to China's booming organ transplant industry. Though the truth is still unknown, the evidence points to a disturbing conclusion about the new China, and of what the rest of the world is willing to ignore. In this original investigation, NTD attempts to discover: 'what happened to the people who disappeared?'

CCP Crimes Exposed

Miramichi Leader: Published Monday July 20th, 2009

July 20, marks ten years since the brutal persecution of Falun Gong began in China. For ten years, Falun Gong practitioners have been branded as criminals by the regime, tortured and killed for no just cause.

It's no secret that the communist authorities use hundreds of different Stalinist torture methods on them in an effort to force practitioners to renounce their belief in truth, compassion and tolerance. So far, there are an estimated 50,000 deaths by torture with tens of thousands still missing after being detained by authorities. Many of them have become unwilling organ donors which is a booming industry in China.

The funny thing about all this is that — no matter how sinister a plight this persecution is — governments of the free world have made friends with the Chinese dictators and perpetrators of these crimes against humanity, rather than supporting the innocent victims who are at the mercy of a bloodthirsty regime. One only has to look at the present massacre of the Uighurs in Northern China to get a taste of the extent of their blood lust. For all these reasons we must persevere in exposing these crimes by the Chinese communist party officials so that our world leaders will come to see the true picture sooner than later and will do the right thing by protecting human rights universally like they should and stopping the bloodshed.

Marie Beaulieu,

Falun Gong As Decade Long Victims of Rule by Terror

Falun Gong As Decade Long Victims of Rule by Terror
By Hon. David Kilgour

Media Conference , 130s Centre Block, House of Commons

MWC: Ottawa ,16 July 2009: Almost exactly ten years ago, the party-state in Beijing launched its campaign against a government-estimated 70-100 million Falun Gong practitioners. The then determinedly-non-political Falun Gong, which is an exercise community with a spiritual component, soon became the latest in a long list of 'enemies of the party'. Atrocities against Falun Gong supporters continue today across China.

Reigns of terror against Party-selected groups and persons have occurred periodically since Mao Zedong seized power in 1949. In the name of revolution, millions were starved to death, for example, in the Great Leap Forward of 1958; countless others were tortured, abused, executed and deprived of basic human dignity. Probably very few Chinese citizens have been treated more brutally than the Falun Gong.

Organ pillaging from Falun Gong practitioners has been studied in an independent report by legal scholar David Matas and myself ( http://organharvestinginvestigation.net ). The two of us found 52 kinds of evidentiary proof indicating that this crime against humanity is occurring. The Government of China has to date made no substantive response to our report.

Just this month, three lawyers were arrested in China for daring to defend Falun Gong practitioners. The persecution of another prominent attorney, Gao Zhisheng, who defended Falun Gong, continues. He was twice arrested and suffered seventy days of torture. Despite repeated appeals from a range of Chinese and international groups for accounts of his whereabouts and release, Beijing ignores them.

Genocide?

David Matas to the International Association of Genocide Scholars at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, concluded on June 9th of this year:

''Every Chinese embassy around the world participates in this incitement (against Falun Gong). Despite their denials, they have to know about the mass killings of Falun Gong practitioners. The evidence fills human rights reports. There are constant media stories. The information is a click of a mouse away on the internet. Any claim of ignorance would mean that they have wilfully been turning blind eyes to the obvious, not a defense in law. So, in sum, the crime of genocide has been committed against the Falun Gong community, through torture, through organ harvesting and through the incitement that leads to both. The elements of the crime, the mass killings based on identity and the intent to destroy the group, can be established. ''

Mr. Matas provided detailed reasons for coming to this legal conclusion, which are available in the Update section of our report website.

China's Gulag

Forced labour is tragically all too common today, but only the party-state of China uses it to punish and suppress fellow citizens. Any Chinese national can be sent to a camp without any form of trial for up to four years upon committal by a police signature. No appeal is possible. Mao in the 1950s closely duplicated the work camp model set up in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, which in China alone continues today.

In China, only Falun Gong camp inmates are used as a live organ bank to be pillaged for sales to foreigners or Chinese nationals. Medical testing is required before organs can be matched with recipients, but only Falun Gong prisoners in the camp populations are tested medically on a regular basis. In the estimated 340 camps across China as of 2005, up to 300,000 "workers" toil in inhuman conditions for up to sixteen hours daily without any pay, producing a wide range of consumer products, mostly for export in blatant violation of World Trade Organization rules.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Such practices are fully consistent with Beijing`s rejection of the recommendations advanced by a number of governments, including Canada's, in a Universal Periodic Review by the UN Human Rights Council earlier this year.

The recommendations rejected by the government of China included: ending all forms of arbitrary detention, including labour camps; guaranteeing freedom of belief and the right to worship in private; implementing the recommendations of the UN Committee Against Torture, which included references to the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and organ pillaging from them; and ensuring that lawyers can defend their clients without fear or harassment.

Trade with China has been in reality a costly proposition for many around the world. A host of its violations of international trading practices contributed to Canada's bilateral trade deficit rising in China's favour from $3.9 billion in 1997 to $26.8 billion in 2006, while ending many manufacturing livelihoods across Canada.

Conclusion

As the world suffers the economic crisis and seeks China's cooperation in dealing with its challenges, it is tempting to overlook Beijing's appalling human rights record. We must remind our leaders that to equivocate on China's record is a departure from Canada's own values of human dignity and the rule of law. We must caution them that trade with China at any price is costly both for the people of China and the world. We must remember the sacrifices of victims of the Tiananmen massacre and other abuses. We must demand that, instead of mocking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, China should honour its provisions.

China and the World Medical Association

by David Matas

(Revised remarks to the International Association of Law and Mental Health Congress, New York City, New York, USA, 1 July 2009)

In China, organs for transplants are sourced almost exclusively from prisoners, a basic violation of ethical standards. The Government of China has openly admitted this sourcing. According to Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu speaking in July 2005, 95% of all organs for transplants come from prisoners¹.

The World Medical Association Statement on Human Organ Donation and Transplantation provides:

"Free and informed decision making is a process requiring the exchange and understanding of information and the absence of coercion. Because prisoners and other individuals in custody are not in a position to give consent freely and can be subject to coercion, their organs must not be used for transplantation except for members of their immediate family."²

Former Canadian Minister of State David Kilgour and I wrote a report on organ sourcing in China released first June 2006 and, in a second version, January 2007 under the title "Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners in China". In that report we concluded that between 2001 and 2006 China killed Falun Gong practitioners in the tens of thousands so that their organs could be sold to foreign transplant tourists.

The Government of China denies this sourcing of organs from Falun Gong practitioners. The debate David Kilgour and I have with the Government of China is not whether organs are coming from prisoners. It is only a debate about what sorts of prisoners are the sources of organs³. However, ethical standards for organ sourcing do not distinguish amongst types of prisoners.

The Chinese Medical Association is a member of the World Medical Association. Its membership continues despite this uncontested, unethical sourcing. Why?

Two years ago, at the International Association of Law and Mental Health Congress, Padua, I expressed concern that the Chinese Medical Association remained a member of the World Medical Association. I asked why the World Medical Association now could not behave as the World Psychiatric Association had behaved in the 1980's in the face of Soviet psychiatric abuse. The Soviets withdrew from the World Psychiatric Association in 1983 when it faced almost certain expulsion.

I expressed my concern not only to the previous session of this Congress, but also directly to the World Medical Association. I sent my Padua text both to the headquarters of the World Medical Association and to all the individual country members of the Association.

David Kilgour and I are human rights activists as well as human rights researchers and writers. Once we came to the conclusion that Falun Gong practitioners were being killed for their organs, we travelled around the globe to try to put an end to that abuse. In the course of our travels, we met with parliamentarians, government and intergovernmental officials, patients who had gone to China for transplants, victims of Chinese oppression who had managed to get out of Chinese jails and out of China, academics, researchers and transplant professionals.

Wherever, whenever we met members of the medical profession, we raised the question I had raised in Padua. Why is the Chinese Medical Association still a member of the World Medical Association?

Three months after the Padua Congress, the World Medical Association moved. In a news release dated 5 October 2007 the World Medical Association announced at the annual General Assembly in Copenhagen an agreement with the Chinese Medical Association. The Chinese Medical Association agreed that organs of prisoners and other individuals in custody must not be used for transplantation except for members of their immediate family.

In a letter to the World Medical Association, the Vice President and Secretary General of the Chinese Medical Association, Dr. Wu Mingjiang, said:

"We would like to inform you that after discussions in the Chinese Medical Association, a consensus has been reached, that is, the Chinese Medical Association agrees to the World Medical Association Statement on Human Organ Donation and Transplantation, in which it states that organs of prisoners and other individuals in custody must not be used for transplantation, except for members of their immediate family.

The Chinese Medical Association will, through its influence, further promote the strengthening of management of human organ transplantation and prevent possible violations of the regulations made by the Chinese Government. We also hope to work more closely with the WMA and exchange information and views on the management of human organ transplantation."

Dr Edward Hill, chair of the World Medical Association, said the announcement by the Chinese Medical Association was a very positive step forward and added:

"We shall now continue our dialogue with the Chinese Medical Association and include other national medical associations in a project to find best practice models for ethically acceptable organ procurement programmes. This would help not only China and its high demand for organs, but also other regions in the world that have the same problems of coping with a severe shortage of organs."

The agreement between the World Medical Association and the Chinese Medical Association to end organ sourcing from prisoners in China except for prisoners donating organs to their immediate family members is welcome. I was pleased to see that the agreement covered all prisoners and not just prisoners sentenced to death. This broader terminology means that in principle the agreement encompasses also Falun Gong practitioners who are held in detention but sentenced to nothing. Yet it does not remove all my concerns.

1. The Chinese Medical Association is not a governmental entity. Its promise to avoid to avoid organ sourcing from prisoners indicates the good will of some Chinese medical doctors. However, it is not binding on the government, and is not binding on doctors in China who are not members of the Chinese Medical Association. The Chinese Medical Association cannot make decisions for the government. The Government sets the rules for associations and not vice versa. The practice of sourcing organs from prisoners, whether prisoners sentenced to death or Falun Gong practitioners, was and is tolerated by the Chinese government. Only the Chinese government that can stop this practice.

2. Even if it had been the Government of China which had entered into the agreement instead of the Chinese Medical Association, it is questionable whether the agreement would be effective. The Chinese government has issued over time issued several laws and regulations prohibiting the selling of organs without the consent of the source, the most recent dating May 2007. The very repetition of such laws is evidence that these laws are not effective.

The Chinese government has had a history of duplicity in this field. One example is the case of Dr. Wang Guoqi. On June 27, 2001, Dr. Wang Guoqi testified before the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the US Congress, that organs for transplants are sourced from prisoners. The Chinese government called him a liar. This position was held until 2005, when for the first time Chinese officials admitted publicly that they indeed harvested organs from prisoners.

3. The Chinese Medical Association is not doing what it can to respect the agreement. Liu Zhi of the Chinese Medical Association's international department said that the agreement with the World Medical Association has no legal effect. He expressed the hope that the agreement would influence China's 500,000 doctors and government decisions. This statement, in my view, minimizes the effect the agreement might have.

At the very least, the Chinese Medical Association can insist that its own members comply with the terms of the agreement as a precondition for continued membership in their association. The fact that the Chinese Medical Association has not done this indicates a less than wholehearted support for the agreement.

4. The Chinese Medical Association agreement does not bind military doctors who are not members of the Chinese Medical Association and military hospitals. Yet, organ recipients indicate that military doctors and hospitals are heavily involved in organ transplant surgery.

5. The agreement does not address the issues of onus of proof. In many cases in China, doctors are supplied an organ and told a source, but make no independent determination whether what they are told about the source is accurate or not.

Tom Treasure, a transplant surgeon wrote in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine⁴ considered it plausible that organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners could happen and that doctors could be "sufficiently distant to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear." The transplant professional is not acting ethically as long as he or she makes no inquiries or only cursory ones.

The agreement with the Chinese Medical Association would not mean very much if Chinese Medical Association doctors could claim respect for the agreement simply by turning a blind eye to practices around them. The agreement needs to ensure that Chinese transplant professionals are respecting the substance of the agreement as well as its form.

The Professional Code of Conduct of the Medical Council of Hong Kong provides a salutary example. The onus is on the Hong Kong professionals to ascertain the status of a donor for a transplant outside Hong Kong.

Specifically the Professional Code of Conduct of the Medical Council of Hong Kong states:

"27.4 In the case of a referral for an organ transplant outside the HKSAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) from any donor, a doctor would be acting unethically if he made the referral without ascertaining the status of the donor...."

This principle should apply to transplant professionals operating within China. The onus should fall on Chinese transplant professionals to ascertain the status of the donor.

6. The agreement does not address the standard of proof. Applying the right onus of proof does not exhaust the duties which fall on transplant professionals. They must also apply the right standard of proof.

If there is any reasonable doubt as to whether the consent is given freely or voluntarily by the donor, the professional within China should have nothing to do with the donation. In light of the fact that no donation from a prisoner can be considered voluntary, then, if there is any reasonable possibility that the organ source is a prisoner, then the transplant professional should not participate in either the sourcing or the transplant.

Again the Professional Code of Conduct of the Medical Council of Hong Kong is instructive. The onus is on the Hong Kong professionals to ascertain the status of a donor for a transplant outside Hong Kong. The Code provides:

"27.3 Consent must be given freely and voluntarily by any donor. If there is doubt as to whether the consent is given freely or voluntarily by the donor, the doctor should reject the proposed donation."

This principle too should be incorporated into the agreement between the Chinese Medical Association and the World Medical Association.

7. In China, transplant surgery has become essential for financing the medical profession and hospitals. A dramatic decrease of transplant surgeries would impose financial burden on the health care system.

Without an increase in the Government funds to the health care system, it is unlikely that hospitals will cease relying on transplant for money. While sourcing of organs and payment for organs are conceptually distinct, they are linked in reality. The need for funds pushes doctors and hospitals to increasing transplant numbers and using historically available sources, prisoners.

8. The agreement with the Chinese Medical Association does not change the Chinese infrastructure for organ transplants. China still does not have a public organ donation program. There is still no law allowing for organ sourcing from the brain dead but cardiac alive.

The implementation of the agreement with the Chinese Medical Association, in the absence of an organ donation system and a brain dead law, would mean that the organs transplantation in China would be almost non-existent, a most unlikely result. Unless China develops an organ donation system and allows for the sourcing of organs from the brain dead cardiac alive, the promises of the Chinese Medical Association are just empty words.

9. The mere fact that the recipient is an immediate family member of the prisoner does not automatically mean that the prisoner has freely consented to the donation. Our concern about this exception is heightened by the fact that people in China can be sentenced to death for a wide variety of economic and political crimes (for example tax fraud).

I am aware that this exception is found in the World Medical Association's Policy on Human Organ Donation and Transplantation. However, it is not to be found in the ethical principles of the Transplantation Society. In my view, the prohibition without exception which the Transplantation Society has adopted is preferable to the prohibition with the immediate family member exception which the World Medical Association has adopted. The case of China highlights why this exception is problematic.

We have to be wary in this context of the excuse of tacit consent. The first Chinese law on transplants, enacted in 1984, presumed tacit consent from "uncollected dead bodies or the ones that the family members refuse to collect" of prisoners sentenced to death and then executed⁵.

This sort of excuse was raised by defendant Karl Gebhardt in the Doctors Trial at the Nuremberg Military Trials. The Doctors Trial was conducted by a US military court in the US occupied zone of Germany in Nuremberg after the International Military Tribunals were completed.

Gebhardt was the personal physician for Himmler charged with crimes against humanity for his participation in Nazi medical experiments. In his defense his lawyers argued that subjects on whom he was experimenting faced execution. Though the experimental subjects did not give explicit consent, they gave tacit consent, his lawyers argued, "being certain that they could not escape execution in any other way".

There was also, so his lawyers pleaded, presumed consent because the consent of the victim "could be expected normally". Rationally and objectively, the victims would have agreed to the experiments to avoid the certainty of their eventual execution.

Gebhardt did not himself select the experimental subjects. Even if there was no actual or presumed consent, his lawyers asserted that Gebhardt should not be held criminally responsible if he erroneously assumed the consent of the experimental subjects. An action can not be considered intentional if it was done on an erroneous assumption of justificatory facts.

The Nuremberg Military Tribunal rejected these arguments. The Tribunal noted that many of the experiment subjects who otherwise faced execution had not gone through any semblance of a trial. The Tribunal wrote:

"That fact could have been known to Gebhardt had he made the slightest inquiry of them concerning their status."

Moreover, so the Tribunal reasoned, even if the experiment subjects had been sentenced to death, the law

"does not under any circumstances countenance the infliction of death or other punishment by maiming or torture."

Gebhardt was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death in August 1947. He was executed in June 1948.

10. The World Psychiatric Association eventually agreed in 1989 to readmit the Soviet Union provided four conditions were met. One these conditions was that the Soviet Psychiatric Association acknowledge that systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes had taken place.

It would seem that a precondition for resolving any problem is acknowledging that the problem exists. Yet, those who enacted the new law are not prepared to do this. The official announcement of the May 2007 law states

"Most organs are donated by ordinary Chinese at death after the voluntary signing of a donation agreement".

This statement is patently untrue and is contradicted by information from other official Chinese sources.

If the Chinese officials are prepared to lie about the present when they talk about this new law, what hope is there that they are telling the truth about the future? How can a law resolve the problem of sourcing organs from prisoners when those who enact the law are not prepared to acknowledge that this sourcing even exists?

In a state where the political arm controls the police, the army, the prosecution and the courts, there is no need for legislation to give the state power to do anything. Legislation serves a propaganda, or, if you will, educational purpose. Especially in a country of over one billion people, it is this propaganda or educational purpose which is paramount. Legislation is a vehicle for communicating a state message.

What is the message of a law which pretends the problem which generated it does not exist? What does this pretence say to those responsible for creating the problem? The message, we suggest, is "go ahead, carry on". "We have not noticed and we will not notice". We are enacting this law for outsiders so that they can think something is being done, not for you.

It is hard to take seriously any suggestion that the authorities are cracking down on misbehaviour when they refuse to acknowledge that this misbehaviour is even taking place. While anti-corruption campaigns in China do not amount to much, at least there is an acknowledgement that there is corruption. Would any one in China take seriously an anti-corruption campaign which refused to acknowledge that there was corruption? Can anyone even in China take seriously legislation to ban the use of improperly sourced organs when the Government of China refuses to acknowledge that organs are improperly sourced?

Another of the conditions the World Psychiatric Association imposed on the Soviet Union as the price of readmission was that the Soviet Union rehabilitate the victims. Rehabilitation of the dead has no significance in this context. But redress does. Redress can take a variety of forms. But at the very least it involves acknowledgement of the reality of what happened.

Whether it be the price of continued membership or the price of readmission after eviction, the Chinese Medical Association, to continue membership in the World Medical Association should do no less. For membership of the Chinese Medical Association in the World Medical Association to continue, the Chinese Medical Association must acknowledge that systematic abuse of transplant surgery for has taken place.

11. There is no verification system in place to determine whether or not the agreement with the Chinese Medical Association is being kept. Such a verification system needs to be independent from the Government of China and the Chinese Medical Association itself.

There has be transparent documentation of the sources of organs used by Chinese Medical Association doctors in transplant operations. The Chinese Medical Association should make accessible to the World Medical Association and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as human rights lawyers' organizations, transplantation numbers which involve its members, donor names and the names of the immediate family members who may receive transplants from prisoners.

12. Statistics about sources of transplants should be publicly available. Both the World Medical Association and the Chinese Medical Association should call for the publication of these statistics.

The United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, and the UN Rapporteur on Religious Intolerance, Asma Jahangir, in their 200 report wrote:

"Allegation transmitted: Organ harvesting has been inflicted on a large number of unwilling Falun Gong practitioners at a wide variety of locations, for the purpose making available organs for transplant operations.... It is reported that there are many more organ transplants than identifiable sources of organs, even taking into account figures for identifiable sources, namely: estimates of executed prisoners annually, of which a high percentage of organs are donated, according to the statement in 2005 of the Vice Minister of Health Mr Huang Jiefu; willing donor family members, who for cultural reasons, are often reluctant to donate their organs after death; and brain-dead donors. Moreover, the reportedly short waiting times that have been advertised for perfectly-matched organs would suggest the existence of a computerized matching system for transplants and a large bank of live prospective donors. It is alleged that the discrepancy between available organs and numbers from identifiable sources is explained by organs harvested from Falun Gong practitioners, and that the rise in transplants from 2000 coincides and correlates with the beginning of the persecution of these persons....⁶"

The Government of China responded but without addressing the concerns raised. As a result, the Rapporteurs reiterated their concerns in 2008 with these words:

"A critical issue was not addressed in the Government's previous responses, in particular: It is reported that there are many more organ transplants than identifiable sources of organs, even taking into account figures for identifiable sources, namely: annual estimates of executed prisoners by whom a high percentage of organs are donated, according to the statement in 2005 of the Vice Minister of HLTH, Mr. Huang Jiefu; willing donor family members, who for cultural reasons, are often reluctant to donate their organs after death; and brain-dead donors. Moreover, the short waiting times that have been advertised for perfectly-matched organs would suggest the existence of a computerized matching system for transplants and a large bank of live prospective donors. It is alleged that the discrepancy between available organs and numbers from identifiable sources is explained by organs harvested from Falun Gong practitioners, and that the rise in transplants from 2000 coincides and correlates with the beginning of the persecution of these persons. The Special Rapporteurs note reports that on 15 November 2006, Vice-Minister Huang reiterated at a conference of surgeons in Guangzhou that most organs harvested come from executed prisoners. And notwithstanding the reported stringent criteria in place for donors, including for those sentenced to death, the Government informed in its response of 28 November, that voluntary donations, and donations between relatives are the two other legitimate sources of transplant organs. According to the allegations, based on data from the China Medical Organ Transplant Association, between the years 2000 and 2005 there were 60,000 transplantations performed, or approximately 10,000 per year for six years. This period coincides with the alleged rise in the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. In 2005, it is reported that only 0.5% of total transplants were accounted for by donations by relatives; non-relative brain dead donors were around nine in 2006; and estimates-given that the Government does not make public statistics on executions-for 2005 indicate 1770 executions were carried out, and 3900 persons sentenced to death. It is alleged that the discrepancy between the number of transplants carried out and the number of available sources is made up from the harvesting of organs from Falun Gong practitioners. However, it is also reported that the true number of executions is estimated to be around 8,000 to 10,000 per year, rather than the figure of 1770 executions referred above. As the Special Rapporteur on torture recommended in his report on his visit to China, he reiterates that the Government (E/CN.4/2006/6/para. 82, recommendation q) should use the opportunity of the restoration of the power of review of all death sentences by the Supreme People's Court to publish national statistics on the death penalty. A full explanation of the source of organ transplants would disprove the allegation of organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners, particularly if they could be traced to willing donors or executed prisoners. The request for an explanation for the discrepancy in the number of transplants between the years 2000 to 2005 and the numbers from identifiable sources of organs is reiterated.⁷"

The Chinese government, in a response sent to the Rapporteurs by letter dated March 19, 2007 and published in the report of Professor Nowak to the UN Human Rights Council dated February 19, 2008, stated that

"Professor Shi Bingyi expressly clarified that on no occasion had he made such a statement or given figures of this kind, and these allegations and the related figures are pure fabrication."

Moreover, the Government of China, lest there be any doubt, asserted that

"China's annual health statistics are compiled on the basis of categories of health disorder and not in accordance with the various types of treatment provided."⁸

Shi Bingyi was interviewed in a video documentary produced by Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong media outlet. That video shows Shi Bingyi on screen saying what the Government of China, in its response to Nowak, indicates he said, that the figures we quote from him he simply never gave. He says on the video:

"I did not make such a statement because I have no knowledge of these figures I have not made detailed investigation on this subject how many were carried out and in which year. Therefore I have no figures to show. So I could not have said that."

Yet, the actual source of the quotation is footnoted in our report. It is a Chinese source, the Health News Network. The article from the Network was posted on the website for transplantation professionals in China⁹. The text, dated 2006-03-02, stated, in part, in translation:

"Professor Shi said that in the past 10 years, organ transplantation in China had grown rapidly; the types of transplant operations that can be performed were very wide, ranging from kidney, liver, heart, pancreas, lung, bone marrow, cornea; so far, there had been over 90,000 transplants completed country-wide; last year alone, there was close to 10,000 kidney transplants and nearly 4,000 liver transplants completed."

Moreover, the information in this article continues to be recycled in Chinese publications. The official web site of the Minister of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China posts a newsletter of June 20, 2008 which states:

"Up to date, China has performed some 85,000 organ transplants, only next to the United States in number. In recent years, China performed organ transplants on more than 10,000 patients a year...Liver transplants have exceeded 10,000 in number... Heart transplants went over 100 in number..."¹⁰

This article flies in the face of the official Chinese statement to the Rapporteurs that China's health statistics are compiled on the basis of categories of health disorder and not in accordance with the various types of treatment provided.

China is a state party to the Convention against Torture. The Convention obligated China to report periodically to an expert committee established under the Convention on China's compliance with the Convention.

The United Nations Committee against Torture, when considering China's most recent compliance report, in November 2008, in its concluding observations, wrote:

"While noting the State party's information about the 2006 Temporary Regulation on Human Organ Transplants and the 2007 Human Organ Transplant Ordinance, the Committee takes cognizance of the allegations presented to the Special Rapporteur on Torture who has noted that an increase in organ transplant operations coincides with "the beginning of the persecution of [Falun Gong practitioners]" and who asked for "a full explanation of the source of organ transplants" which could clarify the discrepancy and disprove the allegation of organ harvesting (A/HRC/7/3/Add.1)."

This issue then was further amplified by the United Nations Universal Periodic Review Working Group in February 2009. The Universal Periodic Review is a new element of the United Nations Human Rights Council which was created in 2006 to replace the failed UN Human Rights Commission. Under the Universal Periodic Review, every state gets reviewed once during a four year cycle. China's turn came up February 2009 in Geneva.

Only states can intervene in the Universal Periodic Review Working Group debate. But it can be any state; it does not have to be a state which is a member of the Human Rights Council. The debate is an interactive dialogue, meaning China has a right to respond.

Regrettably, today in China, there is no publicly available information on numbers of convicts sentenced to death and executed. This information should be publicly available. That would, one would think, be a simple task, now that the Supreme People's Court In Beijing must approve all death sentences. The World Medical Association and the Chinese Medical Association should ask the Government of China to make this information available.

At the Universal Periodic Review in January 2009, Canada, Switzerland, United Kingdom, France, Austria, Italy recommended that China publish death penalty statistics. The Government of China said no to this recommendation.

13. Organ transplant statistics as well as information about execution of prisoners sentenced to death since the advent of the agreement indicate no improvement in the situation. The enforcement of the law of May 2007 has led to an decrease in transplant tourism into China. However, patients from abroad have been replaced by patients from within China.

Before January 1, 2007, the death penalty could be imposed by regional courts, the Higher People's Courts. As of January 1, 2007, any death penalty imposed by a regional court has to be approved by the central Supreme People's Court.

This shift in procedures reduced temporarily the pool of prisoners sentenced to death, according to the tabulation of Amnesty International by about half. Fewer people sentenced to death meant fewer people with these sentences available for organ transplants.

Statistics from the Government of China show that organ transplant volumes have not declined as much as this declining supply. The China Liver Transplant Registry reports these figures year by year:

1998-17, 1999-73, 2000-177, 2001-291, 2002-618, 2003-1128, 2004-2219, 2005-2970, 2006-2781, 2007-1822, 2008-2209.

A blogger toeing the Chinese Communist Party line and disagreeing with the report that David Kilgour and I wrote attempted to argue that these statistics showed that the increase in transplants coincident with the persecution of the Falun Gong was attributable to the acquisition in China of transplant technology and not to the persecution. This argument ignores the statistics of kidney transplants, a technology which had matured and spread a good deal earlier than liver transplant technology and which shows the same increase when the persecution of Falun Gong began.

Year by year figures for China for kidney transplants before the persecution of the practice of Falun Gong began were 1989 - 1,049, 1990 - 1,670, 1991 - 1,746, 1992 - 1,906, 1993 - 1,849, 1994 - 1,621, 1995 - 2,382, 1996 - 2,792, 1997 - 2,552, 1998 - 3,379¹¹. In 1999, the year the persecution began, the figure was 4,265. For 2000, the figure was 5,501, for 2001 - 5,496. By 2004, the figure was 7,300 and for 2005, 10,000.

Amnesty International figures of prisoners sentenced to death and then executed or those years are 1998-1067, 1999-1077, 2000-1000, 2001-2468, 2002-1060, 2003-726, 2004-3400, 2005-1770, 2006-1010, 2007-470, 2008-1718.

If prisoners sentenced to death and then executed were the sole source of organs for transplants, one would expect transplant figures to track execution of prisoners sentenced to death figures. But that is not happening.

2007 shows a decrease in liver transplants, consistent with the fall off in the execution of prisoners sentenced to death and the change in organ transplant law. Yet, the fall off in liver transplants in 2007 was nowhere near the fall off in execution of prisoners sentenced to death.

From 2006 to 2007, the decrease in execution of prisoners sentenced to death was 53%. The decrease in liver transplants was 34%.

Moreover, in 2007 there were two downward pulls on liver transplants. There was not just the decrease in execution of prisoners sentenced to death but also the Health Ministry requirement imposed in 2007 that transplants take place only in registered hospitals. This requirement shut down completely transplants in non-military non-registered hospitals and shut down temporarily transplants in later registered hospitals until they were registered.

This dual downward pull in principle should have created a decrease in transplants substantially more acute than the decrease in the execution of prisoners sentenced to death. Yet, the opposite has occurred.

Persons executed after being sentence to death were, according to Amnesty International, near an all time high in 2004. The figures in 2008 for prisoners executed after being sentence to death were nowhere near as high, about half. Yet, liver transplant numbers in 2008 bounced back to 2004 levels.

How was China been able to hold in 2007 its reduction of liver transplant volumes to only 34% in the face of the imposition of a licensing requirement for non-military hospitals doing transplants and a 53% reduction in what Chinese officials claim to be their almost exclusive source or organs? How has China been able to return to historically high liver transplant volumes in 2008 in the absence of a commensurate increase in execution of prisoners sentenced to death?

The only plausible answer is an increase in sourcing of organs from the only other significant available source, Falun Gong practitioners. Since the report David Kilgour and I wrote came out, the problem of sourcing of organs from Falun Gong practitioners has become worse.

The temptation Chinese hospitals face is obvious when there is a clamorous demand for organs, a ready supply from one source - disappeared, unidentified, calumnied Falun Gong practitioners held in indefinite detention, a reduction in supply from the only other substantial source, and huge amounts of money at stake. Since the agreement between the World Medical Association and the Chinese Medical Association, transplants sourced from Falun Gong practitioners must have increased substantially.

14. There needs to be an independent investigation of the claims that Falun Gong practitioners have been used for organ transplants. The World Medical Association and the Chinese Medical Association should call for such an investigation.

The United Nations Committee against Torture wrote further in its November 2008 concluding observations:

"The Committee is further concerned with information received that Falun Gong practitioners have been extensively subjected to torture and ill-treatment in prisons and that some of them have been used for organ transplants (arts. 12 and 16). The State party should immediately conduct or commission an independent investigation of the claims that some Falun Gong practitioners have been subjected to torture and used for organ transplants¹²."

David Kilgour and I are independent from the Government of China and the Falun Gong community. The Committee against Torture did not mean to suggest anything different. What they were proposing was an investigation independent from the Government of China with which the Government of China would nonetheless cooperate by giving access to Chinese territory, documents, places of detention and witnesses in China without fear of intimidation or reprisals.

At the Universal Periodic Review Working Group, Canada recommended that China implement the recommendations of the Committee against Torture. The Government of China explicitly, in writing, rejected this recommendation.

15. The Government of China needs to take measures to ensure that those responsible for organ transplant abuses are prosecuted and punished.

The United Nations Committee against Torture, in its November 2006 concluding observations, called on China to "take measures, as appropriate, to ensure that those responsible for such abuses [torture and organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners] are prosecuted and punished." The World Medical Association and the Chinese Medical Association should do likewise.

The former chair of the World Medical Association, Dr. Yoram Blachar, who led the World Medical Association delegation to China, said that differences between the two sides remained. The World Medical Association needs to continue to press the Chinese Medical Association on this issue until this appalling practice in China of killing prisoners for their organs ends entirely.

Yet, there is no visible activity from the World Medical Association on this issue since its October 2007 Assembly. The issue of abusive organ transplantation in China appears simply to have fallen off the radar screen. What has the World Medical Association been doing?

..................................................................................................................................

David Matas is an international human rights lawyer based in Winnipeg.

The Communist myth of Falun Gong's original sin

An Occurrence on Fuyou Street

By Ethan Gutmann, National Review

July 20, 2009, VOL. LXI, NO. 13

Ten years ago, on April 25, 1999, while attending a Beijing wedding, I heard a rumor that a large crowd of people had gathered at Zhongnanhai, the Chinese government's compound. I phoned an acquaintance at the South China Morning Post. "Who are they?" I asked. "We think they are called 'Falun Gong,'" he said. "Apparently it's a huge Chinese religious movement, but we don't really know anything about them." Nobody knew much about them, but the scale of the event was shocking: 10,000 Chinese standing silently in the first mass demonstration since Tiananmen. Equally shocking was the party's ferocious crackdown, which came on July 20.

Falun Gong, at its peak a movement of 70 million people, is mostly invisible to China journalists and little more than a footnote in the West. One reason for this is that, of all the dissident groups, Falun Gong is stylistically the most impenetrable and the most Chinese: the torture displays with their strict Daoist delineations of good and evil, the traditional yellow silk costumes that suggest waving fields in an old five-year-plan newsreel, the banners that read like half-translated Chinese semaphores ("SOS URGENT RESCUE," "Bring to Justice Atrocious Police," "Falundafa open out a new era in mankind!"). Their slogans have a distinctly metallic sound to Western ears — a Communist timbre.

Many in Washington would prefer to exclude Falun Gong from the dissident pantheon. The Tiananmen commemorations of June 4 mobilized official Washington: conferences, hearings, Nancy Pelosi's endless references to her human-rights advocacy in Shanghai, and "Where is the Tank Man?" pieces in the major newspapers. Yet when it came time to rally at the Chinese embassy on Connecticut Avenue, only 300 people showed up. Expect three miles of Falun Gong practitioners on July 20, perhaps as many as 5,000. They will dry-clean their yellow silk, purchase plane tickets, and sleep on floors so that Washingtonians can complain that they are blocking traffic. A few congressmen might briefly speak at the rally, but most will keep a safe distance. And there will be no political price for nonattendance, because there will be little press. Covering a Falun Gong parade is the bake-sale beat.

This is curious, considering Falun Gong's achievements: They are the only dissident group that has broken through the Chinese Internet firewall on a mass scale (Iranian dissenters use Falun Gong-designed systems to communicate and surf the Web freely). Until quite recently, they operated the only independent television station on air in China, broadcast into the country 24 hours daily. They print the only dissident daily newspaper, maintain the only significant shortwave radio presence, and on and on.

Or consider Falun Gong from a bleeds-leads perspective. Each of the 300 who came to the Chinese Embassy on June 4 was metaphorically carrying perhaps three or four victims of Tiananmen Square on his shoulders; on the Falun Gong side, we have only begun to assess the damage. They have suffered more than 3,000 confirmed deaths by state torture, abuse, and neglect. According to my current research, a minimum of 10,000 Falun Gong have been killed for their organs. I suspect the final tally will go far beyond that, because the practice is ongoing. So let's speculate that every one of those 5,000 Falun Gong practitioners is carrying ten, perhaps even twenty, corpses on his back — murdered in labor camps, detention centers, psychiatric hospitals, or on operating tables, usually at the hands of a military surgeon. Quantitative analysis by my colleague Leeshai Lemish demonstrates that American media attention to Falun Gong fell in almost exact proportion to rising fatalities. So as we think about the anniversary of Falun Gong's suppression, we must acknowledge that the Western response has given the Chinese Communists a free hand. And the failure starts with the Western media's acceptance of the party's interpretation of April 25, 1999.

It is hard even to refer to the episode without endorsing Beijing's interpretation of events: Out of the clear blue sky, on April 25, 10,000 majestically disciplined Falun Gong practitioners "surrounded" (that's AP and Reuters) or "besieged" (that's AFP) Zhongnanhai, blindsiding the Chinese leadership. The idea that Falun Gong besieged Zhongnanhai in a threatening way is a direct transmission of the Communist-party line. It is repeated in scholarly works on Falun Gong history, and is regarded almost as the movement's original sin. Even practitioners writing in Falun Gong publications — perhaps feeling the history is too hard to explain — often refer to April 25 as a mass "gathering at Zhongnanhai." They treat the word "demonstration" as if it were dirty, which to the Chinese Communist party it is. Whatever you call the demonstration, it was not specifically targeted at Zhongnanhai, much less was it a siege of the compound. Regardless, for the Chinese audience that Falun Gong is trying to reach, the party still owns the language and the history.

But surely not in the West? Recall that Henry Kissinger's statement on Tiananmen — "No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators" — was echoed by Charles Freeman, the Obama administration's recent nominee to chair the U.S. intelligence council. If the foreign-policy elite talk this way about the students of Tiananmen Square, imagine how they view an obscure Eastern revival movement: Well, that's China, and those Falun Gong were asking for it. Scholars might phrase it a little differently. In their telling, the suppression of Falun Gong began as an action-reaction phenomenon and ended as a tragedy: Falun Gong are very good at making mistakes, aren't they?

But it is difficult to believe that they asked to be martyred or that they were given a signal from their spiritual leader to run like lemmings into the labor camps and operating rooms of China. If you do believe that, you should review the history and interview the people who participated on April 25 and the events leading up to it.

Chinese society is often compared to a pyramid, an image that suggests permanence and imperial grandeur. But under Communism it has been more like a rocket in the early days of space exploration: ambitious, jerry-rigged, and potentially explosive. At the bottom is a vast booster filled with masses of peasants and impoverished workers. Moving upward through the second and third stages, one finds the intellectuals, the military, the entrepreneurs and nouveaux riches, and, at the top, a tiny capsule containing the party. From the party's perspective, Falun Gong, with its emphasis on traditional Chinese morality, seemed to spread through the rocket like an electrical fire. By 1996, only four years after the movement began, it had made it to the capsule, and the smoke was attracting serious attention. The response: Founder Li Hongzhi's book, Zhuan Falun, was banned, and Li left for America.

The party continued to watch Falun Gong, but no immediate repression followed. In early 1998 Amy Lee, a well-connected practitioner from boomtown Guangzhou, returned to her parents' home in Shandong for a visit. Opening the door, she saw something that spooked her: Her parents, both active practitioners, had removed every Falun Gong poster and portrait of Li Hongzhi from their walls. All the books were gone. Employing a sixth sense developed over decades of Communist rule, her parents, like animals before a storm, had gone underground.

In 1999, the Public Security Bureau estimated that Falun Gong had attracted 70 million practitioners, 5 million more people than belonged to the Communist party itself. It was at that point that a physicist published an article in a Tianjin Normal University journal portraying Falun Gong as a dangerous cult. China isn't the West, and these things aren't random: The physicist, He Zuoxiu, is the brother-in-law of Luo Gan, at that time the head of public security, and the Tianjin Normal University journal answers to the state. The article was a flare in the night sky, a signal and trial of the party's designs.

In China, when you see such a signal and know you are targeted, there are two options. You can keep quiet — and probably get crushed. Or you can stand up — and still probably get crushed. But Falun Gong takes refuting lies to be a central part of its morality. And it had a method for doing this: show up en masse (it's easy to chop the head of a single religious leader, harder with thousands of believers), stay silent, and simply stand around until someone talks to you. It had employed this method already against earlier negative reports — newspaper articles in 1997, a Beijing television segment in 1998.

Prefiguring the events of April 25, about 5,000 practitioners staged a silent demonstration on April 22 at Tianjin Normal University, asking for a dialogue or a retraction of the physicist's article. The police were called in, and Officer Hao Fengjun was one of them. He says his "entire police force was suddenly maneuvered to the college, told to enforce martial law and close off the area." When he arrived at the scene, he says, "we all realized that it was nothing like what had been described to us — Falun Gong looking for a fight, disturbing public order, and so on. But we had no choice." Indeed, the video surveillance shows nothing more than people sitting around, but the police nonetheless beat and arrested 45 practitioners. Those who tried to reason with the officials and the police were told that the matter had been taken up by the Public Security Ministry, under the central government, and were instructed that they should go Beijing to appeal.

In the two days following the Tianjin arrests, the term "appeal" spread widely among Falun Gong practitioners — not by central command, but simply by word of mouth. It had an explicit meaning: the National Appeals Office, a safety valve against corruption, the only location in China where a citizen can legally complain about the government. Everyone knew that the arrests in Tianjin had set a frightening precedent, and some believed it was better to stay home — Master Li had said more than once that practitioners should avoid politics. Others argued that truth had to be defended, and that what they were considering wasn't a demonstration but a legal protocol. On April 24, thousands of practitioners set off for Beijing. Some made out their wills the night before.

They were followed. A group from Jilin Province was intercepted at a bus station by a special police division and told: Go home, the Tianjin problem is resolved. Others were intercepted in Shenyang by a policeman who had carefully memorized phrases from Zhuan Falun, the better to facilitate communication. One group of 20 took an overnight train from the northeastern city of Harbin. As they stepped onto a Beijing platform that swarmed with practitioners, a phalanx of policemen firmly directed them back on the train.

Not surprisingly, the location of the National Appeals Office wasn't well publicized. Not a single practitioner that I have interviewed could place it precisely on a map. The mysteriousness of its location, near the bull's-eye in the sensitive political center of Beijing, is central to the story. The western border of Zhongnanhai, which lies adjacent to the Forbidden City, is defined by a long, tree-lined avenue, Fuyou Street, which bulges slightly, as if accommodating the power of the walled leadership compound. To the north, Fuyou ends at Wenjin Street, the northern border of Zhongnanhai. To the south, Fuyou intersects Chang'an Avenue, Beijing's central east-west thoroughfare. Some practitioners thought the National Appeals Office office was near the Wenjin Street intersection. Others thought it was closer to Chang'an. But most believed that it was in the hutongs, the labyrinth of narrow alleys right off of Fuyou Street to the west. The entrance to those hutongs is located across from the guarded western entrance to Zhongnanhai.

As April 25 dawned, Zeng Zheng, a young consultant and Falun Gong practitioner, pulled her bike into Fuyou Street and noticed that something was a little off. Zeng had worked at Zhongnanhai briefly and knew the security intimately. Normally there were so many guards that it was difficult to enter the street without being questioned. Now, just before 7 a.m., practitioners were strolling down Fuyou Street, chatting and looking around for the appeals office as if they were in a shopping mall. But a line of police stood on the southern end. The police ordered the Falun Gong to go back up the block and stand at the entrance to the hutong, across from Zhongnanhai's western gate. The Appeals Office would open at 8, Zeng understood. "They were very well prepared," she says. "They were expecting us."

At 7:30, a young couple on their way to the Appeals Office passed by the moat on the eastern side of the Forbidden City. They saw a large detachment of Red Army soldiers sitting in jeeps, bayonets fixed, facing towards Fuyou. By 8, Luo Hongwei, a young newlywed, had just taken her place close to Zhongnanhai's western gate. Perhaps everything would be okay, she thought, exulting in the practitioner's discipline. "There were a lot of people, a lot of people," she says. "It's hard to avoid things' becoming chaotic. But the cars driving past were going swish-swish." By 8:30, an elderly practitioner who asked that I not use her name — let's call her Auntie Dee — made her way into the intersection of Chang'an and Fuyou. The street was now packed with practitioners, mainly country folk, plainly dressed and wearing cheap cloth shoes. As she watched them mill about, carrying their rations of dried food or crouching and eating, the anxiety she had been controlling suddenly swelled in a vivid moment of déjà vu. Ten years ago, she had felt the tanks thunder toward students as they squatted and ate and protested — peacefully, but they were shot anyway.

People were still pressed together in front of the western gate of Zhongnanhai. Yet it was becoming obvious from the enormous police presence moving in from the hutongsthat the Appeals Office, wherever it was, wouldn't be opening — not today. Auntie Dee pushed through the crowd as quickly as she could, not daring to stand in front of Zhongnanhai, straining to keep her eyes from even glancing at it. Eventually she reached Fuyou's northern intersection with Wenjin Street. People were flooding in from the northeast now, and she could see policemen carefully herding practitioners along Wenjin directly opposite the northern exposure of Zhongnanhai. A friend of Auntie Dee's — let's call her Aunt Sha — remembers it well: "They just told us, go this way, go this way, and we followed."

While buses and police cars cruised around the intersection, Auntie Dee suddenly realized that video cameras had been set up at regular intervals and were filming them. Sick with fear now, she tried to move back from the front row: "I thought if they caught me on film, they would come for me later." (She was right: Auntie Dee and Aunt Sha would ultimately be sentenced to labor camp for three years. Zeng Zheng would get two, and Luo Hongwei's husband was released from prison last year.)

It was now nearly 9 a.m. The stage was set for the kabuki performance that followed: Premier Zhu Rongji's conciliatory public appearance and Jiang Zemin's smoldering circle around Zhongnanhai in his smoked-glass limousine. No record, film, or plausible account suggests that the Falun Gong practitioners did anything even faintly provocative during the entire episode, which continued for 16 hours. No littering, smoking, chanting, or speaking to reporters. When one practitioner suggested that they take turns to go eat or drink, others said no, definitely not — if we drink, we'll have to go to the bathroom, and that could disturb those living or working in the area. Even by the Communist party's hair-trigger standards, there was no pretext to the use of the troops waiting by the Forbidden City. The evening announcement that the Tianjin practitioners would be released was greeted with quiet relief. The demonstrators left feeling optimistic. The next day Aunt Sha read the official media reports. "They said: 'Falun Gong gathered at Zhongnanhai.' They didn't say we surrounded Zhongnanhai. They also said that there is freedom to practice or not practice as one wishes," she says. The myth of a disorderly demonstration or riot would not be manufactured until later, in official media reports and in an hour-long film portraying the demonstration as a terrorist act. Because the Western media know so little of Falun Gong, this fiction survives in accounts of April 25.

The rest, I think you know, or can guess: constant reassurances from the party that everything was normal, that the existing policy toward Falun Gong — essentially, don't ask, don't tell — was still operational. Meanwhile, practitioners' phones were tapped, spies appeared at practice sites, warnings were selectively issued at workplaces, and the party created the 6-10 Office (named for its formation on June 10), one of the most terrifying secret police agencies ever created. The machine of the crackdown was ready to be switched on, and the "ringleaders" of April 25 were arrested on July 20.

In response to the July 20 crackdown, practitioners came back to Fuyou Street on July 21. Luo Hongwei was among them: "July 21 was like April 25. We lined up on the street waiting for an official to come so we could talk to them. But no officials came. Instead these huge trucks, one after another, came with police officers and took us away." The crackdown was justified with the myth of a day of infamy — April 25 — a fiction concocted as a pretext to stage an unprecedented persecution, one that continues to this day.

One final point. Officer Hao Fengjun went to work at the 6-10 Office in 2000. "Our monitor room already had a comprehensive record and data on the Falun Gong practitioners," he says. "These things are not something that can be done and collected in just one or two years." According to a former district-level official — call him Minister X — the party's decision to eliminate Falun Gong, and its preparation for that task, happened long before any ban was made public. It was discussed explicitly in party meetings. Jiang Zemin could not resolve the tension that followed the Tiananmen slaughter except by creating a new target, and Falun Gong was it. At least one source claims a communiqué to this effect was being circulated in Qinghua University as early as 1998. No real evidence has emerged that Zhu Rongji, or any other party leader, put up any serious opposition to that decision then, or indeed at any other time. Minister X, for his part, was told to stop granting business licenses to practitioners. April 25, then, was simply the unfolding of an elaborate bait-and-switch, with Falun Gong as the patsy.

Perhaps that term could just as well be applied to the West. It's been ten years. Did the party really mean to kill so many? Perhaps not. It is prone to believing its rhetoric.

So are Western reporters. The party will not fire itself, and it is time for the West to engage the reality of China. A post-Communist civil society in China will include a role for Falun Gong, and we should better understand the real history of the movement. For today, it's enough to dispel at least one myth that feeds the misplaced idea that the West has no business commenting on an obscure family quarrel. Falun Gong did not start this war. The Chinese Communist party did. And the party should be held fully accountable for the results.

Mr. Gutmann, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is the author of Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire, and Betrayal. He wishes to thank the Earhart Foundation and the Peder Wallenberg family for research support.

Tear Down This Cyberwall!

The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof

Published: June 17, 2009 - The protesters’ arsenal, such as those tweets on Twitter.com, depends on the Internet or other communications channels. So the Iranian government is blocking certain Web sites and evicting foreign reporters or keeping them away from the action.

The push to remove witnesses may be the prelude to a Tehran Tiananmen. Yet a secret Internet lifeline remains, and it’s a tribute to the crazy, globalized world we live in. The lifeline was designed by Chinese computer engineers in America to evade Communist Party censorship of a repressed Chinese spiritual group, the Falun Gong.

Today, it is these Chinese supporters of Falun Gong who are the best hope for Iranians trying to reach blocked sites.

“We don’t have the heart to cut off the Iranians,” said Shiyu Zhou, a computer scientist and leader in the Chinese effort, called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. “But if our servers overload too much, we may have to cut down the traffic.”

Mr. Zhou said that usage of the consortium’s software has tripled in the last week. It set a record on Wednesday of more than 200 million hits from Iran, representing more than 400,000 people.

If President Obama wants to support democratic movements on a shoestring, he should support an “Internet freedom initiative” pending in Congress. This would include $50 million in the appropriations bill for these censorship-evasion technologies. The 21st-century equivalent of the Berlin wall is a cyberbarrier, and we can help puncture it.

Mr. Zhou, the son of a Chinese army general, said that he and his colleagues began to develop such software after the 1999 Chinese government crackdown on Falun Gong (which the authorities denounce as a cult). One result was a free software called Freegate, small enough to carry on a flash drive. It takes a surfer to an overseas server that changes I.P. addresses every second or so, too quickly for a government to block it, and then from there to a banned site.

Freegate amounts to a dissident’s cyberkit. E-mails sent with it can be encrypted. And after a session is complete, a press of a button eliminates any sign that it was used on that computer.

The consortium also makes available variants of the software, such as Ultrasurf, and other software to evade censors is available from Tor Project and the University of Toronto.

Originally, Freegate was available only in Chinese and English, but a growing number of people have been using it in other countries, such as Myanmar. Responding to the growing use of Freegate in Iran, the consortium introduced a Farsi-language version last July — and usage there skyrocketed.

Soon almost as many Iranians were using it as Chinese, straining server capacity (many Chinese are wary of Freegate because of its links to Falun Gong, which even ordinary citizens often distrust). The engineers in the consortium, worrying that the Iran traffic would crash their servers, dropped access in Iran in January but restored it before the Iran election.

“We know the pain of people in closed societies, and we do want to accommodate them,” Mr. Zhou said.

China is fighting back against the “hacktivists.” The government has announced that new computers sold beginning next month will have to have Internet filtering software, called Green Dam (the consortium has already developed software called Green Tsunami to neutralize it). More alarming, in 2006 a consortium engineer living outside Atlanta was attacked in his home, beaten up and his computers stolen. The engineers behind Freegate are now careful not to disclose their physical locations.

Granted, these technologies are not a panacea. One Chinese journalist estimated that only 5 percent of the country’s Netizens use proxy software, and the Iranians themselves managed a grass-roots revolution in 1979 without high-tech help. And at the end of the day, bullets usually trump tweets.

Still, it does make a difference when people inside closed regimes get access to information — which is why dictatorships make such efforts to block comprehensive Internet access.

“Freegate was a kind of bridge to the outside world for me,” said a Chinese journalist with dissident leanings, who asked not to be named. “Before accessing the Internet through Freegate, I was really a pro-government guy.”

Human-rights activists from Cuba, North Korea, Syria and elsewhere have appealed to Congress to approve the $50 million Internet freedom initiative, and Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch says he supports it as well.

The Obama administration has been quiet on the proposal. For Mr. Obama, this would be a cheap and effective way of standing with Iranians while chipping away at the 21st-century walls of dictatorship.

•

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Oppressed for exercising Falun Gong

Oppressed for exercising: Refugees' tale resonates

Posted 7/02/09

Howard County Times/The View: Perhaps before you go to the picnic and take in the fireworks this weekend, you'll head for your Saturday morning yoga class, where once a week you spend an hour with 10 or 12 people similarly seeking physical well-being and a sense of spiritual peace and focus.

Now imagine police bursting into the studio, smashing the boom box playing waterfall sounds and hauling you and your friends off to jail, where you're beaten until you renounce the subversive practices of mountain poses and meditation.

Running that scenario through your mind will give you some idea of the experiences of a group of people profiled in this week's edition.

For the past 10 years the Chinese government has suppressed Falun Gong, a practice with similarities to yoga that adherents describe as spiritual, though not religious. By 1998, according to the Falun Dafa Association, at least 70 million people in China alone had taken up the practice. The Chinese government, apparently threatened by Falun Gong's popularity and fearing it as an engine of political unrest, imposed a crackdown.

Falun Gong devotees who escaped to the west -- including some who have renewed their practice in weekly sessions in Centennial Park (see story, Page 42) -- recount arrest, detention and torture.

It's difficult for most of us to fathom how a style of exercise could inspire this kind of brutality. That's a testament to the kind of society -- imperfect though it may be -- that we and our forebears have built in America on a foundation of principles outlined in our Constitution.

You might think about that as you're enjoying Saturday night's fireworks and consider for a moment the deeper symbolism behind the pyrotechnic fun.

Des cadavres chinois dans le placard ?

Cent Papiers: 13 juin 2009

Pas vraiment, on les expose à Québec et les gens affluent

Les organisateurs de l’exposition Bodies « n’ont pas de garantie à 100 % » que les corps ne sont pas des prisonniers chinois exécutés

Autant les organisateurs que les visiteurs de l’exposition Bodies, qui a ouvert ses portes à Québec le 6 juin dernier, ne semblent préoccupés par la provenance des corps morts exposés.

L’exposition, qui se veut scientifique et pédagogique et qui est présentée au Pavillon d’Espace 400e, met en vedette des corps dépecés et injectés d’une substance plastique.

Ce qui soulève l’indignation et la controverse est le fait que les «objets» présentés proviennent de Chine, un pays réputé pour pratiquer le trafic d’organes et exécuter des prisonniers pour répondre aux demandes de ce marché.

Jusqu’à maintenant, les différents responsables de la tenue de l’évènement à Québec ont balayé la critique et indiqué avoir reçu des garanties suffisantes que les corps exhibés ont été donnés à la science ou qu’ils sont non réclamés.

«On nous a certifié que tous les corps présentés ici sont des corps qui ont été donnés à la science ou qui n’ont pas été réclamés», indique Daniel Gélinas du Festival d’été de Québec, cité par Radio-Canada.

Luci Tremblay, porte-parole de l’exposition rejointe au téléphone, refuse pour sa part de commenter sur le sujet et renvoie plutôt les questions aux promoteurs, Premier Exhibitions. «Premier Exhibitions est coté en bourse» et «l’exposition a déjà reçu des millions de visiteurs dans le monde», assure-t-elle.

Catherine Morgenson de Premier Exhibitions, interviewée par Radio-Canada, affirme avoir obtenu certaines garanties des fournisseurs de corps qu’aucune torture ou traumatisme aurait précédé la mort des individus exposés. «On n’a pas de garantie à 100 %, mais nous sommes à l’aise avec le contenu de l’exposition», affirme-t-elle.

Du côté des personnes concernées par l’éthique et des organisations des droits de l’homme, la question ne peut être traitée avec autant de désinvolture.

Selon Anne Ste-Marie, porte-parole d’Amnistie Internationale, les responsables de l’exposition Bodies font preuve d’une «telle ignorance» de la réalité du système judiciaire chinois, qui n’est pas indépendant et qui détient le record des peines de mort décernées annuellement.

Interrogée sur sa connaissance du système chinois, Mme Tremblay, qui refuse de prendre quelconque responsabilité pour la provenance des corps, a répondu : «Je sais c’est quoi la Chine, j’y suis déjà allée.»

«Ce sont des vendeurs d’évènements culturels. Ils n’ont aucune espèce de compréhension de ce que ça peut représenter comme phénomène», souligne pour sa part Mme Ste-Marie.

En avril dernier, une exposition similaire présentée à Paris a reçu l’ordre de la justice française de fermer ses portes. Les ONG Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort (ECPM) et Solidarité Chine ont fait valoir en cour, avec succès, que l’exposition porte atteinte à certains droits fondamentaux.

ECPM indique sur son site Internet que la justice «a considéré que la Société Encore Events, organisatrice de l’exposition, ne rapportait pas la preuve “de l’origine licite et non frauduleuse des corps litigieux et de l’existence de consentements autorisés”».

Confrontée à la réalité de la fermeture de cette exposition à Paris, Mme Tremblay a fait valoir, avec raison, que celle de Québec est produite par une autre entreprise, soit Premier Exhibitions. Sauf qu’il apparaît que ce promoteur a eu ses propres démêlés avec la justice, n’étant pas non plus en mesure de garantir que les corps exposés ne proviennent pas de condamnés à mort.

En mai 2008, le procureur général de l’État de New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, a jugé que Premier était «incapable de réfuter les allégations selon lesquelles les corps exposés proviennent de prisonniers chinois.» Il a forcé Premier Exhibitions à : rembourser les personnes désireuses ayant visité l’exposition Bodies de la ville de New York; obtenir des preuves de la provenance des corps; engager un moniteur indépendant pour s’assurer que les termes de l’entente sont respectés; et indiquer clairement dans l’exposition qu’il n’est pas en mesure de garantir que les corps ne proviennent pas de prisonniers torturés et exécutés.

«La triste réalité est que Premier Exhibitions a profité de l’exposition des restes d’individus qui ont peut-être été torturés et exécutés en Chine», indique le procureur général. «Malgré les démentis récurrents, nous savons maintenant que Premier lui-même ne peut démontrer les circonstances qui ont mené à la mort des individus. Premier ne peut pas non plus démontrer que ces gens consentaient à ce que leurs restes soient utilisés de cette manière. Le respect des défunts et le respect du public requièrent que Premier fasse plus que simplement nous assurer qu’il n’y a pas de raison de nous inquiéter.»

En 2006, le responsable de l’exposition Bodies, Roy Glover, affirmait déjà candidement que ses cadavres ne provenaient pas de donneurs volontaires, rapporte la National Public Radio (NPR).

«Ils [les cadavres] sont non réclamés», mentionne-t-il. «On ne s’en cache pas, nous sommes ouverts à ce sujet.»

«Pour cette raison, plusieurs endroits refusent d’accueillir Bodies», indique NPR.

«Les corps et les membres actuellement exposés à New York sont accrédités à la Dalian Hoffen Bio Technique Company Limited (DHBTC). DHBTC obtient les corps indirectement du Bureau de la sécurité publique chinois…», affirme le communiqué du Bureau du procureur général de l’État de New York.

Selon Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort, se prononçant sur l’exposition Our body à Paris, une série d’indices renforcent l’hypothèse selon laquelle les cadavres utilisés proviennent de prisonniers exécutés : «les morts exposés sont jeunes, sans pathologie apparente et leurs tissus sont parfaitement conservés, ce qui laisse à penser que leur mort a été programmée afin de les plastiner dans les meilleurs délais, avant la dégradation cellulaire; tous les morts exposés sont chinois; or, la Chine est le pays au monde qui exécute le plus (6000 à 8000 exécutions par an); les corps sont en majorité masculins; les corps des condamnés à mort chinois sont rarement réclamés par les familles».

Aux États-Unis, outre à New York, diverses démarches ont été entreprises pour empêcher l’exposition de cadavres avec but lucratif. L’État de la Californie a adopté une loi régissant ce genre de chose en 2007, mise de l’avant par la représentante démocrate Fiona Ma.

«Alors nous parlons potentiellement de milliers de gens, qui ont été drainés, injectés de plastique, tranchés en morceaux comme de la viande et servis à travers l’État pour des raisons commerciales», plaidait-elle à l’époque. «En tant que Sino-Américaine, je sais que peu de gens en Chine feraient un don volontaire de leurs organes ou de leur corps en raison des préférences culturelles et traditionnelles de conserver le corps intact pour l’enterrement après la mort.»

Naissance d’une industrie de la mort

Le concept de ces expositions cadavériques aurait été inventé par l’anatomiste allemand Gunther von Hagens (son exposition Body Worlds était à Montréal dernièrement) et depuis, de nombreux promoteurs l’ont repris alors que ça rapporte des gros sous.

Pour répondre à cette demande croissante de corps plastinés, toute une industrie s’est développée en Chine et comme mentionné plus haut, la matière première est obtenue grâce à des connexions avec les autorités.

Un reportage du New York Times daté de 20061 indique qu’à l’époque une dizaine d’usines de corps voyaient le jour un peu partout en Chine.

«À l’intérieur d’une série d’édifices non identifiés, des centaines de travailleurs chinois, certains assis dans des formations de chaîne d’assemblage, coupent, dissèquent, préservent et réarrangent des cadavres humains, les préparant pour le marché international des expositions de musée», écrit le journaliste du Times.

Trafic d’organes

La controverse soulevée par les différentes expositions de cadavres fait appel au problème du trafic d’organes en Chine. Dans les deux cas, la matière première de l’industrie est la même, soit des corps. Dans les deux cas, il y a avantage à obtenir un corps sans pathologie, en bon état, etc. La différence semble être au niveau des sommes impliquées, alors qu’on rapporte qu’une dépouille peut valoir 300 $ tandis qu’un rein, plusieurs dizaines de milliers de dollars.

Qu’est-ce qui pourrait pousser une prison à alimenter une industrie plutôt qu’une autre? La question se pose. Une chose est certaine, personne ne conteste le fait que les prisonniers exécutés sont la banque quasi inépuisable d’organes servant à la transplantation.

La fondation Laogai, du dissident Harry Wu, se consacre à exposer les camps de travaux forcés en Chine, de même qu’à dénoncer la peine de mort et le trafic d’organes.

«En 2006, le vice-ministre chinois de la Santé, Huang Jiefu, a reconnu publiquement que la majorité des organes transplantés en Chine proviennent des prisonniers exécutés», est-il écrit sur le site de Laogai.

«Bien que les autorités chinoises affirment que les organes ne sont pas prélevés sur les prisonniers exécutés sans leur consentement ou celui de leurs familles, il y a un consensus parmi les éthiciens et les défenseurs des droits de l’homme que les personnes incarcérées ne sont pas en position de consentir, alors qu’ils sont particulièrement vulnérables à la coercition», poursuit le texte.

«En effet, en raison de la corruption omniprésente dans le système judiciaire chinois, combinée aux profits faramineux que peuvent faire les prisons avec la vente d’organes, toute preuve de consentement est au mieux douteuse […] les prélèvements d’organes sont devenus chose commune dans les prisons chinoises, fournissant à l’État encore un autre moyen d’exploiter les prisonniers, même après leur mort», conclut la fondation Laogai.

D’après le rapport Prélèvements meurtriers, coécrit par David Kilgour, ex-secrétaire d’État canadien pour l’Asie-Pacifique, et David Matas, avocat international des droits de l’homme, les pratiquants de la méditation Falun Gong seraient tués pour alimenter le marché des transplantations.

Selon eux, au moment de publier leur rapport, plus de 40 000 transplantations n’avaient pas de source d’organes établie. Ils auraient eu plusieurs confirmations de personnel hospitalier que les organes utilisés étaient ceux de pratiquants de Falun Gong et des statistiques démontrent que le nombre de transplantations a augmenté dramatiquement en Chine au moment où la persécution du Falun Gong a débuté en 1999.

Il y a donc des inquiétudes au sein de la communauté Falun Gong que de leurs membres, torturés et tués par la police chinoise pour avoir refusé de renoncer à leurs croyances, pourraient se retrouver dépecés et exposés à travers le monde.

New York Parade Highlights Persecution of Falun Gong

By Charlotte Cuthbertson & Matthew Little
Epoch Times Staff Jun 6, 2009

A young girl holds a picture of her father who was tortured to death in China for practicing Falun Gong. (The Epoch Times)

The long line of mourners hold pictures of killed Falun Gong practitioners in a parade in New York, 6 June, 2009. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Calling for help. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

A depiction of the persecution of Falun Gong in China. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Torture victims' photos are carried by Falun Gong practitioners in a New York parade, June 6, 2009. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

NEW YORK—Row after row of people dressed in white carried photographs of men and women through New York in a parade that was at times joyful and at other times deeply sad.

White is the traditional color of mourning in China, and the photographs gave faces to some of the more than 3,000 Falun Gong practitioners confirmed killed by China's authoritarian regime.

The parade included two marching bands and displays of traditional Chinese culture like waist drums and dragon dancing, but it was hundreds of solemn-faced men and women with memorials to the deceased that most stirred many of the observers.

The number of dead stunned Kenneth Alberty, a New Yorker who watched from the sidewalk as the mourners walked by.

“It's wrong,” said Mr. Alberty “but they didn't die in vain.”

He said the procession reminded him of the days of Martin Luther King and struggles in America's civil rights movement.

“This is history being made.”

For some of picture bearers, the faces they carried were more than a memory and tribute to those that died for their beliefs, they were friends and family taken in a persecution campaign that had touched them personally.

Like 11-year-old Rao Deru who carried a memorial to her dead father. That man, 34-year-old Rao Zhuoyuan, was kidnapped by Chinese police in December 2000 and died in detention two years later. At one point, the torture he suffered had reduced him to 78lbs.

A teary-eyed Joanna Qiao carried a photo of Wang Kefei, who was 34 at the time of her death.

“When I hold this picture of the practitioner who was persecuted to death I feel they are here with us,” she said.

Ms. Qiao was also persecuted while she lived in China for her practice of Falun Gong.

“Carrying this photo is very meaningful for me, I am honored.”

“It's heart breaking,” said Shanetta Dorsey, 20, as she watched the procession go by. “This is ridiculous.”

Ms. Dorsey is in New York from Ohio for an internship. Her friend Shameka Jennings, 18, from Maryland, said she was shocked more people didn't know about the crackdown in China.

“It's just outrageous to see,” she said. “Knowing about it is not enough, I want to do something about it.”

She said the United States government should do more to pressure China to improve its human rights, despite economic concerns.

More than 4,000 Falun Gong practitioners participated in the parade in Manhattan to both celebrate their practice and to mourn those killed in the Chinese regime's persecution. Among the sections in the 20-block-long parade was one devoted to encouraging Chinese people to break their ties with Chinese Communist Party, China's sole political party and defacto government.

Falun Gong practitioners who suffered all kinds of tortures and escaped from the jaw of death have recorded more than 100 cruel torture methods. The following are only several examples, taken from the Falun Dafa Info Center.

There are over 100 methods the Chinese regime uses to torture Falun Gong practitioners into giving up their belief in the practice, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.

Cruel beating is the most commonly used torture, says the organization's website.

Many practitioners have become deaf from these beatings, their outer ear tissues have been broken off, their eyeballs crushed, their teeth broken, and their skull, spine, ribcage, collarbone, pelvis, arms and legs have been broken; arms and legs have been amputated due to the beatings.

Electric shocks are also commonly used in the forced labor camps where Falun Gong practitioners are taken for "punishment" and "conversion." Police often shock practitioner's mouths and genitals with the electric batons they use in the camps.

China's 'socialist road' to misery

By Jeff Jacoby Globe Columnist / June 3, 2009

IT IS 20 YEARS since the Tiananmen Square massacre, and China's communist regime hasn't budged an inch.

The government has no reason to regret its murderous crackdown during "the political storm at the end of the 1980s," a foreign-ministry spokesman in Beijing told reporters last month. "China has scored remarkable success in its social and economic development. Facts have proven that the socialist road with Chinese characteristics that we pursue is in the fundamental interests of our people."

As a euphemism for dictatorial savagery, "the socialist road with Chinese characteristics" may not rise to the level of, say, "Great Leap Forward" or "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution." And certainly the material riches and capitalist bustle that characterize much of China in the 21st century are a far cry from the mass starvation and unspeakable chaos that devastated the country in the 20th. But make no mistake: The junta in Beijing is no kinder or gentler today than it was at Tiananmen 20 years ago, and no less prepared to crush anyone who resists its grip on power.

Perhaps nothing today so exemplifies the totalitarian implacability of China's rulers as their ruthless persecution of Falun Gong, a quasi-religious discipline of meditation and breathing exercises, combined with moral teachings about truth, compassion, and forbearance. By civilized standards, it is incomprehensible that anything so innocuous and peaceable could provoke bloody repression. But China's uncivilized government fears any movement it does not control, and Falun Gong - with its uplifting values so different from the regime's Stalinist ethic - has attracted

tens of millions of adherents, independent of the Communist Party.

There is nothing subtle about Beijing's decade-long campaign to suppress Falun Gong. At www.faluninfo.net/gallery/12, the Falun Dafa Information Center describes several of the torture techniques the government uses to break Falun Gong practitioners. Burning, for example. In hundreds of reported cases, police or labor camp authorities have used cigarettes, car lighters, or red-hot irons to sear Falun Gong believers on their faces, torsos, and genitals .

Other victims have been forced into water dungeons - locked cages immersed in filthy water. "Some water dungeons . . . have sharp spikes protruding on the inside of cramped cages," the center reports. "Usually, the water dungeons are well-hidden rooms or cells where practitioners are forced to stay for days and nights on end in total darkness. The water is most often extremely filthy, containing garbage and sewage that leaves the victim with festering skin." Other torture methods include electric shock, brutal forced "feeding" with concentrated salt water or hot pepper oil, and injection of nerve-damaging psychotropic drugs capable of inducing "horrific states of physical pain and mental anguish."

Independent and third parties have raised numerous alarms about China's inhumane war on Falun Gong.

The UN's Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions has cited reports of "harrowing scenes" of Falun Gong prisoners dying from their treatment in government custody, and noting that "the cruelty and brutality of these alleged acts of torture defy description." Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly highlighted the agonies inflicted on Falun Gong practitioners. So have a handful of supremely courageous Chinese lawyers, among them Gao Zhisheng and Li Heping. In 2007, Canadian attorney David Kilgour, a former prosecutor and member of Parliament, co-authored a detailed report documenting the systematic harvesting of vital organs from imprisoned Falun Gong believers, in order to supply China's lucrative transplant industry.

All these atrocities, of course, account for only one narrow lane on that "socialist road with Chinese characteristics" that Beijing so adamantly defends. The government of China is no less vicious in its persecution of devout house Christians, of Tibetan Buddhists, of democratic dissidents who seek greater liberty, of journalists who fail to toe the Communist Party line, of the countless inmates enslaved in "re-education through labor" camps, or of women who wish to decide for themselves how many children to have.

Twenty years after the screams and blood and slaughter at Tiananmen Square, the People's Republic of China is still a great dungeon. "China is first and foremost a repressive regime," the noted China scholar Ross Terrill has written. "The unchanging key to all Beijing's policies is that the nation is ruled by a Leninist dictatorship that intends to remain such." That was the truth in 1989. It remains the truth today.

Beijing hasn’t changed

Taipei Times: This year marks two anniversaries that are testimony to the brutality and ruthlessness of China’s despotic one-party state: the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the persecution of Falun Gong.

Twenty years ago on June 4, the world watched in horror as troops with tanks and machine guns stormed Tiananmen Square and crushed unarmed students who had gathered to demand democratic reform. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed.

On July 20, 1999, the regime launched the persecution of Falun Gong, complete with its own Krystallnacht-type middle-of-the-night mass arrests. Ten years later, the torturing and killing continue, with Falun Gong practitioners composing half of the quarter million labor-camp prisoners in China, US State Department figures show.

The June 1989 protests, which took place in many cities across China and involved millions, was a courageous bid to escape the repressive yoke of communism.

But alas, it wasn’t to be. While China’s economy has surged ahead, human rights and freedom of opinion for the Chinese people is still a pipe dream.

The nature of the Beijing regime is repression and killing. It’s a pattern begun by chairman Mao Zedong (毛澤東) that has not let up — it’s just done more covertly these days. The Tiananmen Square Massacre and the crackdown on Falun Gong, a non-political spiritual discipline, are proof of that. This particular leopard has not changed its spots.

I just hope that those who want to see China become the next great world power remember this.

JOAN QUAIN

Victoria, Canada

Regime Autocracy the Cause of Violence Against Attorneys

By Fu Ming & Yu Lin
Sound of Hope Radio Jun 1, 2009 via Epoch Times

Beijing lawyers Zhang Kai and Li Chunfu were beaten by Chongqing police because they defended a Falun Gong adherent. (The Epoch Times)

Mr. Du Guang, former Deputy Director of Theory Research of the Party School under the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, recently spoke to Sound of Hope Radio International about the latest incident involving attorneys being beaten by police. He said, “These two lawyers were beaten by the police because of their responsibility to pursue justice. It fully reflects the atrocious nature of the authoritarian regime.”

Beijing attorneys, Li Chunfu and Zhang Kai, were illegally arrested and beaten by Chungqing police on May 13. They were handling the mysterious death case of Jiang Xiqing, a Falun Gong practitioner.

Mr. Du indicated, “The two lawyers went to Chungqing to investigate the case. It was a normal legal procedure. But instead, they were met with violent beating from police. This is unbelievable.”

On May 17, 60 lawyers and legal experts held a forum to support the two lawyers involved in the case. Mr. Du also commented that the Bar Association had failed to represent the lawyers and conduct legal business according to law.

He said, “The Bar Association is an organization for the lawyers to reflect attorneys’ needs and rights. In fact, rather than to protect the profession, many Bar Associations have become the regime’s tools to suppress the lawyers and ignore lawyers’ rights. I disagree with this phenomenon.”

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Mr. Du also blamed the regime’s autocracy for numerous attorneys’ troubles during applications for Bar examination and licensing registration. He said, “This is exactly the atrocious nature of the regime.”

Falun Gong practitioner Jiang Xiqing died in Chungqing Labor Camp. The medical report concluded the cause of death as acute heart attack. However, the autopsy identified breakages in the left 4th, 5th, and 6th ribs. Family members found injuries all over Jiang’s head, chest and legs. Jiang’s organs were removed without his family’s consent. Upon the request of Jiang’s families, Beijing lawyers Li Chungu and Zhang Kai arrived in Chungqing on May 13 to discuss details with the families. More than 20 police showed up and violently beat the two lawyers. Lawyer Zhang was hung by handcuffs in a metal cage. Both his hands were swollen. He was beaten till unconscious, and suffered a bleeding ear. Both lawyers were detained illegally for near 10 hours.

Read this article in Chinese: http://epochtimes.com/gb/9/5/29/n2541320.htm

Forced Labour and Organ Harvesting

Epoch Times: By David Matas May 31, 2009

Chinese doctor Wang Wenyi speaks at a press conference in Arlington, Virginia, 26 April 2006 about forced organ harvesting by Chinese authorities on live Falun Gong practitioners. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

China engages systematically in forced labour in all forms of detention facilities - prisons which house sentenced criminals, administrative detention for those not yet charged, and re-education through labour camps. A 1998 declaration of the International Labour Organization (ILO) commits all member states, including China, to eliminate forced labour. The Government of China reported to the ILO that its constitution prohibits forced labour and that there is a national policy of eliminating all forms of forced labour.

China is not a country with an independent judiciary and the rule of law. There is no means in China of enforcing the promises in the Constitution. What the Constitution of China says is not a reliable indicator of what is happening in China.

The Constitution of China provides:

"Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration"[1].

"Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief.

"No state organ, public organization or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not believe in, any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in, any religion"[2].

Yet, these freedoms do not exist in China.

So, when the Government of China says that there is a constitutional provision, its statements may be and often are smokescreens, exercises in hypocrisy. That is true of its statements to the ILO on forced labour.

The same can be said about policy. China has many policies which diverge from reality. Indeed, the Government of China refers so often to the state constitution and Government policies when the reality is the opposite that the very Government reference to these standards should be an indicator that something improper is happening in China.

Organ harvesting

A policy area with which I am familiar is organ harvesting, the killing of prisoners for their organs to be used for transplants. David Kilgour and I have written a report that some of those prisoners are Falun Gong practitioners detained for their innocent beliefs[3].

The Government of China denies the conclusion of our report and says that those who are in prison merely because they are Falun Gong practitioners are not killed for their organs. Yet the Government does not deny that some prisoners are killed for their organs and that these prisoners are the primary source of organs for transplants in China.

Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu, speaking at a conference of surgeons in the southern city of Guangzhou in mid November 2006, acknowledged that executed prisoners sentenced to death are a source of organ transplants. He said: "Apart from a small portion of traffic victims, most of the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners."

The dispute David Kilgour and I have with the Government of China is which sort of prisoners are killed for their organs. The Government of China says that the prisoners killed for their organs are all prisoners sentenced to death. Why we disagree with the Government of China, why we conclude that prisoners sentenced to death are not the only prison source of organs for transplants in China, I put to one side for now. I invite you to read our report Bloody Harvest to see how we came to our conclusions.

The point I want to make here is that the Government of China, at the same time as it admits sourcing organs from prisoners, has a policy of not sourcing organs from prisoners. In a news release dated October 5, 2007, the World Medical Association announced at the annual General Assembly in Copenhagen that the Chinese Medical Association agreed that organs of prisoners and other individuals in custody must not be used for transplantation except for members of their immediate family.

Liu Zhi of the Chinese Medical Association's international department said that the agreement with the World Medical Association has no legal effect. He nonetheless expressed the hope that the agreement would influence China's 500,000 doctors and government decisions, a hollow wish as long as China does not have an organ donor system or a law sourcing organs from the brain dead/cardiac alive.

Forced labour

Chinese government hypocrisy on forced labour could not be more blatant. Forced labour in detention is not an abuse of Chinese law. It is the law. The Chinese Law on Prisons stipulates that prisons may punish a prisoner who is able bodied but refuses to work[4].

The United States signed a memorandum of understanding with China in 1992 committing the Government of China to ensure that prison labour products are not exported to the United States. The US in 1994 signed a statement of cooperation which in principle allowed US officials to gain access to Chinese production facilities suspected of exporting prison labour products. The US China Economic and Security Review Commission in its report to Congress for 2008 wrote that "the Chinese government has not complied with its commitments" under the 1992 and 1994 agreement "making it impossible for U.S. officials to conduct complete and useful investigations of such allegations".

Speaking to U.S. journalists in November 1993, in answer to a question about the desire by rights groups to inspect prisons, then Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen said, "I believe that if the Red Cross does put forward such a request..., we would give positive consideration to that request." The Red Cross did put forward such a request, and there was no positive consideration.

Persons are routinely detained in China without charge or for long periods before a charge is laid. Forced labour occurs in administrative detention and the euphemestically labelled re-education camps as well in prisons where sentenced criminals are kept.

Once the practice of Falun Gong was banned in 1999, hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners travelled to Beijing to protest or to unfold banners calling for the group's legalization.People came almost daily.Author Jennifer Zeng, formerly of Beijing and now living in Australia, writes that by the end of April 2001 there had been approximately 830,000 arrests in Beijing of Falun Gong adherents who had been identified.

Those who revealed their identities to their captors were shipped back to their home localities. Their families were implicated in their Falun Gong activities and pressured to join in the effort to get the practitioners to renounce Falun Gong. Their workplace leaders, their co-workers, their local government leaders were held responsible and penalized for the fact that these individuals had gone to Beijing to appeal or protest.

To protect their families and avoid the hostility of the people in their locality, many detained Falun Gong declined to identify themselves. The result was a large Falun Gong prison population whose identities the authorities did not know. As well, no one who knew them knew where they were.

There are no statistics available of practitioners who were arrested but refused to self identify. From our interviews with released Falun Gong practitioners, we know that the number of those who did not self identify is large. But we do not know how large.

Arrested Falun Gong practitioners were initially sent to administrative detention centres. Those who recanted were released. Those who did not recant were tortured. Those who recanted after torture were released. Those who did not recant after torture disappeared into the re-education through labour camps. The U.S. State Department's 2005 country report on China[5] indicates that its police run hundreds of detention centres, with the 're-education through labour' ones alone having a holding capacity of about 300,000 persons.

The Department of State's Country Reports for 2008 state: "Some foreign observers estimated that Falun Gong adherents constituted at least half of the 250,000 officially recorded inmates in the country's "reeducation through labour camps...."[6]

Forced organ donor banks

An extremely large group of people subject to the exercise of the whims and power of the state, without recourse to any form of protection of their rights, provides a potential source for organ harvesting of the unwilling. These detention facilities are not just forced labour camps. They are also potential forced organ donor banks.

The investigations which led to the report David Kilgour and I wrote had many chilling moments. One of the most disturbing was the discovery of a massive prison/detention/labour camp population of the unidentified. Practitioner after practitioner who eventually was released from detention told us about this population. A collection of some of their statements is set out in our report.

What these practitioners told us was that they personally met the unidentified in detention in significant numbers. We have met many Falun Gong practitioners who were released from Chinese detention. Yet, except for those detained during the early days of Falun Gong repression, we have yet to meet or hear of, despite their large numbers, a practitioner released from detention who refused to self identify in detention from the beginning to the end of the detention period. What happened to these many practitioners? Where are they?

I went to Geneva in November 2008 to meet with the United Nations Committee against Torture about the report of Government of China on compliance the Convention against Torture. The Committee, in its November 2008 concluding observations, wrote: "While noting the State party's information about the 2006 Temporary Regulation on Human Organ Transplants and the 2007 Human Organ Transplant Ordinance, the Committee takes cognizance of the allegations presented to the Special Rapporteur on Torture who has noted that an increase in organ transplant operations coincides with 'the beginning of the persecution of [Falun Gong practitioners]' and who asked for 'a full explanation of the source of organ transplants' which could clarify the discrepancy and disprove the allegation of organ harvesting (A/HRC/7/3/Add.1). The Committee is further concerned with information received that Falun Gong practitioners have been extensively subjected to torture and ill-treatment in prisons and that some of them have been used for organ transplants (arts. 12 and 16).

"The State party should immediately conduct or commission an independent investigation of the claims that some Falun Gong practitioners have been subjected to torture and used for organ transplants and take measures, as appropriate, to ensure that those responsible for such abuses are prosecuted and punished[7]."

We are independent from the Government of China and the Falun Gong community. The Committee against Torture did not mean to suggest anything different. What they were proposing was an investigation independent from the Government of China with which the Government of China would nonetheless cooperate by giving access to Chinese territory, documents, places of detention, and witnesses in China without fear of intimidation or reprisals.

The reaction of the Government of China to these concluding observations was this: "Some biased committee members, in drafting the observations, chose to ignore the substantial materials provided by the Chinese Government, quoted and even fabricated some unverified information. Running counter to the ethics of justice and objectiveness, they attempted to politicize the review by squeezing some unreal and stigmatized comments into the concluding observations, which China firmly opposes[8]."

The Chinese Government reaction, by referring to "some biased committee members" suggests that some members of the Committee were biased and others were not. Yet, the Committee recommendations were unanimous. Either all the Committee members were biased or none were.

The Government of China as well makes wild general accusations. It accuses the Committee of fabricating information without indicating what that information is which was supposedly fabricated. Nor does it indicate what are the comments in the Committee's concluding observations the Government considers unreal and stigmatized.

Despite the vagueness of the reaction, it is apparent that the Government of China did not accept the concluding observations of the Committee in their entirety. When it came to the Universal Periodic Review, a procedure of the UN Human Rights Council in which the human rights record of every UN member state is reviewed periodically, the Government of China was a lot more specific.

I went to Geneva again, in January, this year and lobbied governments to raise the violations identified in our organ harvesting report when China's turn came up at UN Universal Periodic Review Working Group. At the very least, I asked states to request China's compliance with foundational rights, the respect for which would have made the violations we identified impossible. Many delegates did speak out for these foundational rights during the two hours of the Universal Periodic Review Working Group allocated to these speeches, but to no avail. The Government of China rejected virtually all these rights.

China rejects

The Universal Periodic Review Working Group came out with a report tabulating the recommendations of states which spoke during debate. The Government of China reaction, which followed immediately upon release of the report, gave us a clear idea of what its earlier words had meant. It accepted some recommendations, mostly from other gross violator states which commended the Government of China for its efforts and encouraged it to keep on doing what it was doing. It added that it would consider other recommendations. There was also a long list of recommendations the Government of China rejected out of hand.

At the Universal Periodic Review Working Group, Canada recommended that China implement the recommendations of the Committee against Torture. The Government of China explicitly, in writing, rejected this recommendation.

Canada, the United Kingdom, Hungary, the Czech Republic, France, Sweden and New Zealand recommended that China abolish all forms of arbitrary detention, including re-education through labour camps. The Government of China said no to this recommendation.

Forced labour is an abuse of the rights of those in detention in China. It also harms workers around the world by undercutting the prices of products free workers produce for wages, contributing to global unemployment in a time of economic downturn. And it sets the stage for organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners.

Allowing outsider access to Chinese places in detention is not an end in itself. It is rather a means to an end, to assess compliance with international standards, to ensure that abuses in detention are not occurring.

Something similar can be said of forced labour. Ending forced labour is an end of itself. But it is also a means to an end. Ending forced labour and allowing independent investigators to visit places of detention would be important steps towards ending abusive organ sourcing from Falun Gong practitioners.

Canada should have legislation banning the importation of goods produced through forced labour. The Government of Canada should negotiate an agreement with the Government of China committing the Government of China to ensure that prison labour products are not exported to Canada. The agreement should allow Canadian officials to gain access to Chinese production facilities suspected of exporting forced labour products.

The fact that China has not respected similar agreements with the United States is no reason to abandon the effort to stop the export of forced labour products from China. Where the efforts of one country, the US, have failed, the efforts of many countries may succeed. In any case, at the end of the day, when it comes to promoting respect for human rights, we can never rest content with no as an answer.

[1] Article 35

[2] Article 36

[3] Bloody Harvest: Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China

[4] Article 58

[5] U.S. Department of State 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - China, March 8, 2006.

[6] 2008 Report on International Religious Freedom: China

[7] Concluding observations of the UN Committee against Torture on China UN Document number CAT/C/CHN/CO/4, 21 November 2008 paragraph 18(C).

[8] Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Qin Gang's Remarks on Concluding Observations of United Nations Committee against Torture on China's Compliance with the Convention against Torture

This article comprises remarks made by David Matas at a Forum on Human Right in China held in Canada's Parliament buildings on May 27, 2009.

David Matas is a Winnipeg based international human rights lawyer and the co-author, with David Kilgour, of "Bloody Harvest: Revised Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China"

The CCP continues to see ghosts

Taipei Times /By Sushil Seth
Thursday, May 28, 2009, Page 8

With the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan rebellion of 1959 still fresh in the memory, Beijing now has to confront the 20th anniversary of the student-led democracy movement that was crushed in Tiananmen Square.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has taken all the necessary steps to prevent — and crush, if necessary — any protests that might take place next week.

In 1989, students seeking political reforms were met with tanks as the regime feared being toppled by a ragtag movement seeking a more open political system with transparency and accountability.

That system was, and still is, racked with corruption.

Was there any serious danger to the CCP from the student movement? Then-CCP general secretary Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽) didn’t think so and was toppled by the ruling clique led by Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平).

In secret tapes recorded by Zhao during his 16 years in house arrest until his death, he raised some pertinent questions.

“It was determined [by the leading CCP group] that the student movement was a planned conspiracy of anti-party, anti-socialist elements with leadership,” Zhao said.

“So now we must ask, who were these leaders? What was the plan? What was the conspiracy? What evidence exists to support this?” he wrote. “It was also said that that there were black hands within the party. Who were they?”

“It was said that this event was aimed at overthrowing the People’s Republic and the CCP. Where is the evidence?” Zhao said.

His conclusion was that there were no such elements conspiring to overthrow the CCP.

“I had said at the time that most people were only asking us to correct our flaws, not attempting to overthrow our political system,” he said.

One might think that having crushed the last perceived organized threat to its monopoly on power, the CCP would feel at ease. But the paranoia persists.

The system remains alert to any organized sign of resistance that might emerge.

After all, the Falun Gong movement emerged out of nowhere and managed to hold a large public protest in 1999. Soon afterwards, the movement was banned and declared an evil cult, with thousands of followers arrested and tortured.

The persecution continues.

Falun Gong was never a threat to the CCP’s rule. But overkill is still the mark of the ruling oligarchy.

The fact is that China’s rulers do not want to take any chances with unruly masses, believing they need the perpetual control and guidance of the CCP to prevent the country from plunging into chaos.

This is the CCP’s self-serving mythology that has been parroted ever since. In the absence of any kind of popular endorsement of its rule, the CCP has had to create the illusion of impending disaster if the party is not around.

This makes the party and the country indistinguishable. In other words, a Chinese citizen ceases to be “patriotic” if he or she seeks political change.

If a group meets regularly to talk of democracy as a political alternative for the country, soon enough its members will find themselves behind bars.

Zhao, though, favored the democratic alternative. He reportedly said that: “It is the Western parliamentary system that has demonstrated the most vitality … [and] meets the demands of a modern society.”

But the CCP is unlikely to follow this route to commit political suicide. Indeed, it actively works to destroy any challenge (real or imagined) to its political monopoly.

The government freely uses charges of subversion and leaking of “state secrets” as justification to throw people in jail.

Other no-go topics are Tibet, Taiwan and Uighur separatism in Xinjiang.

In other words, the country’s communist rulers have multiple grounds to throw people into jail.

The Internet, though, is posing problems. Despite a panoply of firewalls built by the Chinese government to deny people access to certain types of information, those determined enough do manage to keep themselves informed through alternative sites.

Most Chinese, however, live on a diet of government-fed information that provides a filtered view of their country and the world.

With the economy slowing, however, social unrest has been increasing.

Even with growth rates of more than 10 percent, China has been unable to provide jobs for many of its teeming millions.

The rural economy is so depressed that young men and women from the countryside flocked to urban industrial centers for jobs.

There have been an estimated 140 million migrant rural workers in cities. With the closure of urban factories, about 20 million have already gone back to their homes and farms.

If the process of rural workers trekking back to the countryside continues, it will aggravate social unrest.

There are no jobs for them back home and their families’ farms can hardly feed more mouths. With progressively reduced remittances back home, the rural families will have an even harder time.

Already, there is a three-fold gap between rural and urban incomes. Any widening of this gap is likely to create further tensions.

There is a sense that the Chinese government is aware of the grim social reality of even harder times in rural areas. It is, therefore, diverting resources to the rural sector as part of the overall stimulus package.

Jonathan Fenby, China director at Trusted Sources, said Chinese in rural areas “aren’t benefiting much from the US$1 trillion sloshing out in China in fiscal and monetary stimulus.”

That is because: “That money is going mainly to big urban-based firms, while the drop in remittances from migrant workers in coastal export zones is hitting village income, deflation is reducing income from sales of food, farm input costs have risen and mechanization is uneconomic in many places, given the small size of plots allowed under the land ownership system.”

At the same time, in the cities, the middle class finds itself with fewer economic opportunities. Young graduates coming into the job market find it increasingly difficult to find jobs.

Therefore, even if China’s economy continues to grow (but at nearly half the growth rate reported in the last decade) things are pretty grim.

As economic difficulties create more social tensions and unrest, China’s paranoid leadership will start seeing ghosts of political challenge, which might lead to greater repression.

This is not to suggest that the CCP’s grip on power is in any immediate danger. The suggestion, though, is that an increasing aggregation of social tensions could create an explosive situation in the short or medium term.

Falun Gong, definitely not a cult!

Introduction

1. Falun Gong, which emerged in China in the early 1990’s, is a spiritual practice promoting the self-improvement of the body, mind, and spirit. The guiding principle of Falun Gong is “Truth, Compassion, Forbearance”. Falun Gong contains five sets of simple, gentle meditation and exercises. It promotes self-awareness and moral and ethical behaviour in an individual’s thought and actions.

Falun Gong encourages people to live upright and harmonious family lives. Practitioners of Falun Gong strive to practice in an open and dignified manner. Falun Gong teaches people to always think of others and be kind and benevolent toward people in all circumstances. The teachings of Falun Gong require and promote treasuring all lives and socially acceptable activity. The teachings of Falun Gong prohibit homicide, suicide and criminal activity. The practice of Falun Gong is voluntary and practitioners are free to participate or not to participate according to their own individual wishes. Practitioners pay no money to practice or participate in Falun Gong. While practitioners consider Master Li the teacher, practitioners are encouraged to think for themselves.

Testimony from Expert Witness

2. In a court hearing in Canada November 17, 2003, Professor David Ownby, one of the very few in the world who did field work and research on Falun Gong stated:

“In North America, Falun Gong practitioners are fairly well off, they’re very well educated, the generally live in nuclear families…They often work in computers or finance or, a lot of people in physics, engineering…They’re better educated, more wealthy, live in better houses than the average Canadian”.

3. In his testimony (November 17, 2003), Professor Ownby comments that unlike cults, Falun Gong has no mandatory financial obligations, isolation of practitioners in communes or withdrawal from the world.

4. Similarly, with respect to the Chinese regime’s allegations of murder, etc, Professor Ownby testified (November 17, 2003) that he had not come across any such homicidal tendencies and that in fact a basic tenet of Falun Gong is “that life is to be respected”. He also stated that

“Nothing in (his) research would connect Falun Gong practitioners with organized crime or with criminal behaviour of any sort”.

5. As for the repeated accusations that Falun Gong encourages practitioners to withdraw from society and to break from their families, he stated “This is simply not the case”and added:

“Falun Gong members remain within society. In a vast majority, they live within nuclear families. They go towork, they send their kids to school…”

6. His conclusion was that Falun Gong was not a cult and its practices were not dangerous. He found “quite little harm” in Falun Gong principles. In his International Journal article, far from seeing evil in Falun Gong, he comments: “My impression … is of innocence…and (that there is) little in the practices of North American practitioners that causes concern”.

7. Reference should also be had to Professor Ownby’s findings that the bulk of Canadian Falun Gong practitioners are very well educated, usefully employed and successful and have close family ties.

Judgement from Ontario Human Rights Tribunal

8. Ontario Human Rights Tribunal Finds Falun Gong a Protected Creed under Ontario Human Rights Code:

http://www.canlii.org/en/on/onhrt/doc/2006/2006hrto1/2006hrto1.html

News release http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en_text/news/e_bg_falun-gong.shtml
http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en_text/news/e_pr_falun-gong.shtml

Expert Evidence

Western scholars of religion would characterize Falun Gong as a new religious movement. The essence of Falun Gong is spiritual elevation. Falun Gong practitioners believe in the existence of gods and divine beings in the cosmos. Its leader, Li Hongzhi, has written a form of ‘scripture.‘ His message is profoundly moral. "
- Quote from news release by Ontario Human Rights Commission after judgement rendered by the Tribunal

Court Judgement

9. In a May 13, 2008 judgment, Appeal Court of Montreal ruled that the local Chinese newspaper La Presse Chinoise defamed Falun Gong and the founder of Falun Gong when the paper used word-for-word propaganda of the Chinese regime to describe and attack the Falun Gong and the founder.

Comments from CSIS, FBI, and RCMP, and Police Force

10.The Hate Crime Unit of the Police Service in Edmonton considers the Chinese Regime's propaganda against Falun Gong (distributed by the Chinese Consulate in Alberta) hate incitement. In the Edmonton Police report regarding one of the cases, in the Edmonton hate crime unite police's investigation report, it stated:

"It is in my professional opinion that the literature being disseminated by the accused [Chinese consulate staff in Calgary] does constitute hate as indicated by the supreme court in the Keegstra decision, ...."

“It should be noted that CSIS, FBI, and RCMP National Security have explainly verbally that Falun Gong does not pose a security threat to Canada.”

“Canada security, law enforcement and non government agencies and organizations have identified Falun Gong as a peaceful religion that pose no threat to the security of the country…. Some examples of organizations that confirm this verbally and through documentation are:

CSIS, Edmonton Police Servic, RCMP, National Investigative Services, FBI, ... "

Comments from Governor General, and Members of Parliament

"They cultivate the will to live in peace with themselves and in harmony with the universe, thus learning compassion for others and helping to create a more open and tolerant society."
- Her Excellency Adrienne Clarkson, former Governor General of Canada

"What we are witnessing today in China is the "criminalization of innocence" – the criminalization of a spiritual meditation exercise group – thereby subjecting all its members to intimidation, prosecution, persecution, and imprisonment, for no other reason than that they espoused the basic, fundamental values of Truth, Compassion and Forbearance."
- Hon. Irwin Cotler, former Minister of Justice

DEFAMATION AND HATE IS THE FOUNDATION OF THE PERSECUTION

In 2001 A Washington Post investigative report stated that the Jiang Regime admits to three tactics in its persecution campaign against Falun Gong: state sanctioned violence, high-pressure propaganda, and brainwashing. The report quotes a Chinese official stating, “none of it would be working if the propaganda hadn’t started to change the way the general public thinks.”

Hate materials combined with slander, fabricated stories, and distorted facts have been forced into every facet of Chinese society, through all Chinese media, all levels of PRC government, work units and communities, to turn public opinion against Falun Gong. This hate has created an environment of hatred and contempt toward men, women and children who practise Falun Gong and apathy from much of the Chinese populace who turn their backs to the documented and nation wide torture and death of Falun Gong people.

In Amnesty International’s 2001 report titled, The crackdown on Falun Gong and other so-called ''heretical organizations,'' it states, “…the Chinese government launched a massive propaganda campaign to denounce the practice and the motivation of its founder, Mr. Li Hongzhi… the impartiality of the government's information is questionable. Furthermore, the information published by the government leaves many essential questions unanswered.”

PERSECUTION SPREADS TO CANADA

In the 2004 National Post Feature article titled, “Falun Gong persecution Spreads to Canada,” it details how for the past seven years, Falun Gong practitioners in Canada have been living under suppression by the anti-Falun Gong campaign instigated by the Chinese Communist Regime and implemented through the Chinese Embassy and Consulates in Canada. (http://dawn.thot.net/fofg/feature14.html)

Vancouver Chinese Consulate vs Falun Gong

Well said Mark!

Mark Hasiuk, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, May 27, 2009

THE CHINESE CONSULATE

Van Courier: Last February, following years of legal wrangling, Falun Gong practitioners dismantled their shack outside the Chinese consulate on Granville and 16th Avenue.

Yet the consulate still stands--a grim and grey reminder of China's many sins, which include censoring political speech, silencing government critics, controlling the press, limiting Internet access, detaining without trial, torturing prisoners, restricting freedom of speech and assembly and association and religion, beating Tibetan monks and leading the world in capital punishment. With the possible exception of B.C. Place, the Chinese consulate is the most offensive structure in Vancouver.

Six thousand Falun Gong practitioners form 3-D ‘Zhuan Falun’ book

Taiwan Celebrates World Falun Dafa Day

By Ao Manxiong
Epoch Times Staff May 10, 2009

In the morning of May 9, over six thousand Falun Gong practitioners gathered at the Puding Prairie in Kenting, Taiwan, and lined up to form the book Zhuan Falun. (Wu Bohua/The Epoch Times)

PINGTUNG, Taiwan—May 13, 2009, is World Falun Dafa Day and the seventeenth anniversary since Falun Dafa's founder, Mr. Li Hongzhi, began teaching in China. There will be celebrations all around the world.

Six thousand Falun Gong practitioners in Taiwan gathered at the Puding Prairie in Kenting, in southern Taiwan, on the morning of May 9—lining up to form an image of Mr. Li’s book Zhuan Falun. The activity was to celebrate and commemorate the spread and blessing of Falun Dafa as well as to show their respect and gratefulness to Mr. Li.

Cheng Chi-Mei, organizer of the activity said, “Lining up to form the book Zhuan Falun is the first time practitioners in Taiwan composed the three Chinese characters ‘Li-Hong-Zhi’ and formed a three-dimensional Zhuan Falun book. Also, we have broken the record with the largest number of people joining in an activity of forming these Chinese characters.”

Chen Gui-lin was in charge of location planning. “Many Falun Gong practitioners went three days without sleep to decorate the area in gusty winds. The Puding Prairie has Mt. Tajian in the background and the Pacific Ocean in the front. One can see the Eluanbi Lighthouse from afar. The Lighthouse symbolizes Zhuan Falun being a guide of hope and light.

More than six thousand Falun Gong practitioners gathered at the Puding Prairie in Kenting, southern Taiwan, and did the five Falun Dafa exercises together, May 9. (Wu Bohua/The Epoch Times)

“In previous years, the celebrations of World Falun Dafa Day were often held at the Chiang-Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei or tourist spots in central Taiwan. This is the first time we have moved the celebration to the southern tip of Taiwan,” said Chen.

At 10 a.m. on May 9, in the Celestial Marching Band played music, while 6,000 practitioners wearing white and yellow lined up and wished Mr. Li Hongzhi a happy birthday. They then did the five Falun Gong exercises and participated in a parade through the streets. The celebration ended at 6 p.m.

Hong Ji-hong, member of the Falun Dafa Association in Taiwan, said that everyone came to the prairie out of gratitude. “They joined the sacred and meaningful activity to celebrate Mr. Li’s birthday and World Falun Dafa Day.”

The practitioners that joined the character-forming activity came from all walks of life. The oldest was 98-year-old Ma from Tainan city, and the youngest was 4-year-old Hsu Fa-En. Before Ma practiced Falun Gong, his health was poor, “I spent my days taking pills and injections. I was better dead than alive. My greatest fortune came when I had the opportunity to learn Falun Dafa 10 years ago. Shortly thereafter I was pain and illness free.”

Four-year-old Hsu came with his father from Taipei. He sat with his legs crossed among other practitioners and said, “I am a young practitioner. Falun Dafa is good. I wish Teacher happy birthday.”

Mr. Li Hongzhi started teaching Falun Gong on May 13, 1992, in Changchun city, northeastern China. Seventeen years later, Falun Dafa has spread to over 80 countries in the world. On May 13, 2000, practitioners celebrated the first World Falun Dafa Day to let the people of the world understand the significance of this day.

The book Zhuan Falun has been translated into over 30 languages and is the main text of Falun Gong.

Read original article in Chinese.

Prime Minister Harper Sends Greetings for Falun Dafa Month

Epoch Times Staff May 13, 2009

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Contents of Letter:

May 2009

Greetings from the Prime Minister

I am pleased to extend my personal greetings to the Falun Dafa Association of Canada as you celebrate Falun Dafa month.

Canadians are blessed to live in a country that embraces the many cultures and traditions of the world. Canada draws tremendous strength from its democratic heritage. As Canadians, we are grateful for Canada's shared values of openness and tolerance and the freedom of conscience and religion, which honour our unparalleled diversity and the foundations of our democratic society.

As you celebrate the 17th anniversary of the introduction of Falun Dafa to the public, I commend the Falun Dafa Association of Canada for sharing your practices and traditions with the public. On behalf of the Government of Canada, I extend my best wishes for a joyous and memorable celebration.

Sincerely,

The Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, P.C., M.P.
Prime Minister of Canada