Human Rights: April 2007 Archives

By Maureen Fan | The Washington Post
April 30, 2007

Olympics an Excuse for Arrests, Amnesty Says

The 2008 Olympic Games have become a catalyst for more repression in China, not less, according to an Amnesty International report released today and aimed at pressuring the Beijing government a year before the start of the world's premier sporting event.

The 22-page report says China's illegal detention and imprisonment of activists and other measures have overshadowed some modest reforms, including how the Chinese legal system reviews death penalty cases and the loosening of some restrictions on the foreign press. The report marks the latest effort by human rights organizations and individuals to try to use the Olympics, and the international spotlight they place on China, to push for broader reforms.

To win its first-ever Olympics bid, China promised in 2001 to improve human rights, increase environmental protections and address the city's traffic problems. The Games are expected to attract 500,000 visitors, including thousands of journalists, giving China a chance to showcase itself before a huge international audience.

In recent weeks, however, various groups have begun arguing that China has not done enough.

Last Wednesday, four American tourists were detained after unfurling a banner at a base camp on Mount Everest that read, "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008," a play on the Beijing Olympics motto.

>> Read the complete article

By Evan Mantyk | The Epoch Times (New York)
April 28, 2009

Chinese-Consulate-linked student group attempts to disrupt

NEW YORK—An International human rights lawyer brought his shocking investigative report into allegations of organ harvesting to Columbia University on April 20. The lawyer, David Matas, detailed 31 pieces of evidence proving that adherents of the persecuted spiritual practice Falun Gong are having their organs forcibly removed in state-controlled hospitals in Communist China. The forum was titled, "China's New Genocide."

Those in attendance included medical doctors, community members, as well as university professors and students, including foreign students from a Chinese student club—said to be under the direction of the Chinese Consulate of New York City—who mobilized to disrupt the forum.

Matas's report features recorded interviews with doctors in China, people who have traveled to China for transplants, and the wife of a surgeon who harvested organs from Falun Gong adherents. The report has stirred up the international community, leading some to seriously question the integrity of China's rulers and the appropriateness of its holding the 2008 Olympics, scheduled for Beijing.

"I think that people who turn a blind eye to human rights violations in China are hurting China not helping China," said Matas, who worked with a former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour to compile the independent report. The Chinese Communist regime has recently admitted to the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners, likely in an attempt to shift media attention away from the harvesting of Falun Gong adherents' organs, which it denies.

The Communist regime's only reply to Matas' investigation amounted to a tacit acknowledgement of its claims. Matas said the "reply" consisted of a denunciation of Falun Gong and harped on a clerical error it spotted, listing two Chinese cities in the wrong provinces.

Matas said the report hits on deeper ethical issues plaguing China. "Aside from getting the harvesting to stop against Falun Gong practitioners, all three of these should be addressed: the persecution of Falun Gong should stop, the precautions that are not put in place should be put in place [to stop organ harvesting], and prisoners of no matter what source should not be the source of organs."

At the forum, Dr. Charles Lee, a medical doctor and Falun Gong adherent from California, shared his experience of being tortured and brainwashed with communist propaganda while a prisoner of conscience in China for three years.

Lee said, "We are not talking about China as a whole. We are talking about the Chinese Communist regime, who has been persecuting Chinese people for 56 years."

The forum was co-sponsored by Columbia University's Amnesty International chapter and the Falun Dafa Club.

Students Attempt to 'Refute'

Two dozen or so members from the Columbia University Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CUCSSA) attended the forum apparently in an attempt to disrupt and "refute" it.

CUCSSA students held signs bearing communist slogans and hate speech typically used by state-controlled media in Mainland China.

University police were dispatched to the forum after the CUCSSA email was intercepted and university officials alerted to their plans. Police sought to ensure that the students from the CUCSSA didn't interfere with the event, according to a statement from Columbia University.

Two students were forced to leave the forum after disruptively waving offensive signs and interrupting forum speakers.

One event attendee, a Columbia graduate student, remarked afterwards that the CUCSSA group made a "display of obstinance, narrow-mindedness, rigidness, and a lack of independent and critical thinking... and denial." She attributed the group's conduct to "early trauma from years of brainwashing imbedded in the culture [of Communist China] and its political history."

The CUCSSA group was likely put to task by the Chinese Consulate of New York City. The club's advisory board is composed of two high-ranking members from the consulate, Mr. Fanglin Ai and Mr. Da Yao, and the club's website boasts that its constitution was reviewed by the consulate.

A spokesman for the consulate, Mr. Wenqi Gao, said he had not heard of the forum and would not answer any questions regarding Mr. Fanglin Ai or Mr. Da Yao, and hung up the phone when directly asked if he knew who they were. He also refused to acknowledge that Falun Gong practitioners are being persecuted in China, something that is regarded as fact by many international human rights organizations, the United Nations, the U.S. government, and several thousand eye-witnesses who have sought to document such abuses.

Speakers at the forum each devoted some of their time to addressing CUCSSA students and their apparent misunderstandings on events in China.

Matas pointed out that the student club's actions reflect the "demonization of Falun Gong by the Chinese Communist Party" and how "easy it is, under such social conditions, for the Chinese Communist Party to harvest organs from Falun Gong practitioners."

By Radio Free Asia
April 27, 2007

Chinese authorities repeatedly and separately questioned five Americans detained for two days after they staged an Olympic-related protest on Mount Everest before expelling them on Friday, one of the protesters has told Radio Free Asia.

“There were about five questions,” Tibetan-American Tenzin Dorje told RFA’s Tibetan service. “Their main question was whether anyone helped from inside Tibet—who helped us to write in Tibetan and Chinese, and so on. Where did we eat? Where did we go by vehicle?”

On arriving at the base camp, the five—all activists from the U.S.-based Students for a Free Tibet group—unfurled a banner saying, “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008.” They were identified as Tenzin Dorje, the first known exiled Tibetan to return to the region to protest, Kirsten Westby, Mac Sutherlin, Jeff Friesen, and videographer Shannon Service.

Their protest came on the eve of an announcement of the route to be taken by the Olympic torch to Beijing, which will host the 2008 Games. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said the five were detained for “carrying out illegal activities aimed at splitting China” for which they must be expelled from China.

“Finally we were released this morning and transported to the [Nepal] border post at Drum,” Tenzin Dorje said. “When we were first detained, we were taken to an office right at the base camp of Mount Everest…They started interrogating us there. They didn’t ask us questions in a group but took each individual to a separate room and conducted their interrogation there. One police officer asks questions, another takes notes, and two or three stand by with rifles ready. We were detained in the same office from 9.30 a.m. to about 10 p.m.”

>> Read the complete article

By Lu Jianhui | The Epoch Times
April 22, 2007

HONG KONG—Retired doctor Gao Yaojie of Henan Province, who is named as China's first civil AIDS spokesperson, has been put under house arrest again when she returned to Henan from the U.S. after receiving an award a report states. She sighs mournfully about herself. She believes that death is a relief and she wants to die on the same day that her husband passed away.

The current issue of Asia Weekly published an interview with Dr. Gao that revealed she was placed under house arrest again after she traveled to the U.S. to receive the "Global Women Leaders Award" and returned home to Zhengzhou City. Even her visitors are monitored and have to register.

Dr. Gao said, "I am now being monitored and have become blind, deaf and dumb. The authorities' actions are an outrage. Once I die, they will be relieved. However, I want to let everyone know that my death is due to those corrupt officials."

Dr. Gao took out a cell phone she had been using for years; the message "unregistered SIM card" appeared on it. An hour ago she received a phone call from her younger sister in the U.S. who told Dr. Gao that she had made at least ten phone calls to Dr. Gao's home, but no one answered. Dr. Gao was always at home, but her phone did not ring.

The report said, "It was only then that Gao realized she was being monitored by the Henan local government again and they were trying to block her from having contact with the outside world."

Once before, the Henan authorities sent ten policemen to surround her home. They cut off her phone lines to stop her contact with outsiders in order to prevent her from going to the U.S. to accept the award.

Dr. Gao went to accept her award on February 26.

When she returned to Zhengzhou her phone could be used at first, but soon after it was cut off. Dr. Gao said, "I am not so optimistic regarding the problem of AIDS in China; I don't know what it will be like in the future. I have put my life into it."

The report didn't explain how they were able to conduct the interview with Dr. Gao during her house arrest.

By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
10 April 2007

BEIJING, April 9 — Gao Zhisheng, one of China’s most outspoken dissidents until his conviction on sedition charges late last year, said in a recorded statement made available over the weekend that while his confession had resulted in a light sentence, it had been made under mental and physical duress.

Mr. Gao’s remarks, recorded by a close friend and offered to journalists in Beijing, were his first public statement since he was convicted in December. He was given a suspended sentence.

His confession brought criticism from some other human rights advocates.

Mr. Gao lives in Beijing with his wife and children. But he said he remained in nearly total isolation, surrounded by plainclothes security forces and forbidden to leave his home, use his telephone or computer or otherwise communicate with the outside world.

He also said that a lengthy confession letter released to the public by the authorities after his conviction, while genuine, had come only after he had been subjected to torture. He said his interrogators repeatedly threatened to punish his wife and children unless he admitted the crimes they said he had committed.

“Although in the past I had some idea of how this group ignores justice, how they nakedly and impudently use evil means to realize their objectives, I really did not understand well enough,” Mr. Gao said, referring to Chinese public security forces.

He said his captors had forced him to sit motionless in an iron chair for extended sessions that totaled hundreds of hours, surrounded him with bright lights and used other torture techniques aimed at breaking his will. He said he had agreed to their terms because they repeatedly intimated that the well-being of his wife and children could not be guaranteed unless he cooperated.

“In the end I decided I could not haggle about my children’s future,” he said.

Mr. Gao, a lawyer, gained prominence among human rights advocates and grass-roots organizers in China and their supporters overseas for his uncompromising denunciations of police and judicial abuses and his scathing open letters to senior Communist Party leaders.

He called attention to what he described as systematic abuses against members of the Falun Gong spiritual sect, which is banned in China. He also helped organize a hunger strike against intimidation tactics used by the country’s State Security forces.

>> Read the complete article

The Epoch Times
March 31, 2007

Ma Jian is the branch manager of the French PCM Pumping Industry company's Beijing office. He also manages the company's business in northern Asia. On February 28, 2007, Ma was arrested by Beijing police as he was working. He was secretly sent to a brainwashing class where he was tortured for 20 days. On March 19, Ma was transferred to the Detention Center in Beijing's Dongcheng District.

Ma, 38, has a Masters degree in Business Administration. Ma has worked in the French PCM company for nearly four years. He began to practice Falun Gong in 1996. Ma has remained steadfast in his practice even after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began to persecute Falun Gong in 1999.

According to a report on Clearwisdom.net, Ma was arrested by the police at about 5 p.m. on February 28. The arrest took place in Ma's office. Eyewitnesses revealed that Ma was beaten by police during the arrest. Ma's whereabouts had been since unknown after his arrest.

Ma's wife Yao Lian now resides in Canada. She has appealed to the international community in an effort to draw attention to her husband's unlawful arrest. Falun Gong practitioners in France and Canada are working on rescuing Ma.

On March 24, Yao and Amnesty International co-hosted a press conference in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Yao appealed to the international community to help rescue her husband. Mr. Sushil Handa from Amnesty International's Montreal branch called for international attention to the CCP's continuous cruel persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in mainland China. He also called for attention to the CCP's violation of human rights and international human rights treaties. The press conference was attended by many media groups including CBC French Radio.

Following Ma's unlawful arrest, his family went to the Dongcheng branch of Beijing Public Security Bureau to request information. A police officer from the Dongcheng branch denied that Ma was being held under arrest. Ma's father-in-law and mother-in-law were later asked to sign an arrest document for Ma Jian. On the written arrest document, the arrest date was many days later than the actual date on which Ma was arrested by police. Because of the inconsistencies in the record, Ma's in-laws refused to sign.

Subsequent to Ma's arrest, the PCM company sent a letter to the Beijing Public Security Bureau through the French Embassy in Beijing, inquiring why their employee in Beijing had been arrested. They have received no reply. When the company attempted to hire a lawyer to defend Ma, they were told that lawyers in China are not allowed to defend practitioners of Falun Gong.