Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the committee for holding this hearing and for inviting the Falun Dafa Association of Canada.
Lawyer Gao Zhisheng has been called “the conscience of Chinese lawyers”. China's Ministry of Justice hailed him as one of China's top ten lawyers in 2001. He's not a Falun Gong practitioner, yet he himself is currently under arrest for defending human rights in China--in particular, for his three open letters to Chinese government leaders calling for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong.
Mr. Gao wrote, in his letter dated late 2005:
Among the true accounts of unbelievable brutality among the records of the government’s inhuman torture of its own people, the immoral acts that shocked my soul the most were the lewd yet routine practice of attacking women’s genitals by 6-10 office staff and the police. Almost every woman’s genitals and breasts or every man’s genitals have been sexually assaulted during the persecution in a most vulgar fashion.
Below are two accounts of the cases he cited. In the first case:
Ms. Lijun Wang was tortured in a small metal cage three times. Inmates tied many knots on a thick rope and pulled it back and forth in a sawing motion across her vagina. Her entire lower body swelled up. The head police then ordered inmates to jab her swollen vagina with the thorny end of a broken mop stick. This torture caused Ms. Wang's vagina to bleed profusely. Her abdomen and vagina were so swollen that she could not pull up her pants, or sit, or urinate...
In the second case:
Mr. Liu Haibo was stripped of all his clothes and forced to kneel down. The police pushed in the longest electric baton they could find from the bottom and gave his organs electric shocks. Liu died immediately on the site.
These are only two accounts of the numerous atrocities suffered by Falun Gong practitioners daily in China over the past seven years. The majority of the brutal cases remain unreported. Revealing such information constitutes the severe crime of “leaking state secrets”.
Yue Yao, wife of Canadian resident Wenyu Liu in Calgary, is one of 14 jailed practitioners with Canadian ties. In 2001, she was sentenced to 12 years in prison for downloading information from Falun Gong websites and printing materials for distribution.
Introduced in China in 1992, Falun Gong is a peaceful spiritual belief that cultivates the mind, body, and spirit through gentle exercises and by following the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Yet the nature of the Chinese Communist regime is quite the opposite. It advocates violence, deception, and the destruction of traditional moral values and beliefs.
By official government estimates, there were over 70 million people practising Falun Gong by 1999. The regime formulated the following policy against Falun Gong: “Defame their reputation, bankrupt them financially, eliminate them physically” and “Count the death of Falun Gong practitioners as suicide.”
Communist China regards Falun Gong as its number one enemy and has utilized the cruelest means imaginable against its practitioners. Over 100 means of torture have been documented.
According to a 2001 Australian Broadcasting Corporation report, “Falun Gong practitioners make up close to half the number of Chinese people being held in labour camps, a process that requires no legal or judicial ruling.”
In March 2006, Manfred Nowak, the UN’s special rapporteur, reported that torture remains widespread in China and that Falun Gong practitioners represented 66% of all the alleged torture cases. The persecution spans all of China; nearly 3,000 verified death cases have been reported. The real number is unknown and is believed to be much higher.
Recently, David Kilgour and David Matas concluded in their independent investigation report that there has been and continues today to be large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners by the Government of China and its agencies in numerous parts of the country.
The vast widespread killing of Falun Gong practitioners for profit to provide organs for transplants is “so shocking that it represents a new form of evil on this planet”.
Pursuant to these vital findings of organ harvesting of live Falun Gong practitioners, I strongly believe that it warrants a formal hearing by the committee.
I want to highlight two key findings from Professor Burton's report on the assessment of the bilateral dialogue:
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs' mandate is to defend China's interests abroad. It has no institutional interest in promoting respect for China's human rights domestically.
The dialogues involve only a small number of Chinese people and have no mechanism to spread the information beyond this small group.
These findings underscore the futility of the dialogues. The persecution of Falun Gong was in fact launched and has continued to escalate after the bilateral human rights dialogue process began in 1997. The systematic eradication of Falun Gong through hate incitement, torture, and killing constitutes severe crimes against humanity.
We believe China does concern itself with world opinion, and more and more Chinese people are aware and want a society that provides for human rights and fundamental freedoms. The international community, including Canada, has a crucial role to play to help uphold these values and principles.
We also recommend that the Canadian government: one, call on China to stop the persecution of Falun Gong and release all practitioners being held in custody; two, suspend the bilateral dialogue until the critical concerns from Professor Burton's report are adequately addressed; three, put human rights at the forefront of Canada's China policy, using every opportunity to promote respect for human rights in China and to speak publicly against human rights abuses in China; and, four, include civil society such as Falun Gong representation in any future human rights engagement with China.
Democratic countries are ultimately held accountable to fulfill our responsibilities. Only by ending crimes against humanity and protecting the safety and well-being of our fellow world citizens can we truly protect the security and dignity of our own country. There is no other choice we can make as human beings.
Thank you.