European Practitioners' Chinese New Year Celebration Activities: Part 2 - Press Conference

European Falun Gong practitioners’ Chinese New Year celebrations started with a press conference. The first speaker, the Chairman of the French Falun Gong Association, said that under the persecution initiated by Jiang Zemin and the Chinese Communist Party, nearly 1,400 Falun Gong practitioners have lost their lives and hundreds of thousands of others are being tortured in forced labour camps. He urged everyone to strive together to help the world become more peaceful and tolerant.

A practitioner read out New Year’s greetings from the Magistrate of Paris City’s 19th District, where a parade was held after the press conference, as well as other greeting messages from an MP, the current Mayor of Versailles and a member of the French Ecology Party. They either wished all the Chinese people and Falun Gong practitioners a Happy New Year or expressed their support for Falun Gong practitioners’ endeavours to appeal for their own rights and freedom.

Next was a speech given by Mr. Fabrice Orlandi, the lawyer entrusted to launch legal action after the poor treatment of Falun Gong practitioners by French authorities last year. During Chinese leaders’ visit to France at the end of January 2004, a few hundred Falun Gong practitioners gathered in Paris to peacefully request China to stop the persecution against the practice. Regrettably, bowing to pressure from the Chinese Communist regime and violating its own basic principles, French law enforcement agencies carried out arbitrary searches, arrests and detention of Falun Gong practitioners. This not only infringed on the practitioners’ personal freedom, but also led to more serious consequences: Falun Gong practitioners were impeded in their efforts to expose the brutal persecution of Falun Gong in China to the governments, media and people; this unwittingly helped the persecutors of Falun Gong.

The day before the parade, on behalf of Falun Gong practitioners, Lawyer Fabrice Orlandi filed a lawsuit with the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, requesting a comprehensive investigation into the French police’s harassment of Falun Gong practitioners at the end of January 2004.
In his speech and interview with the media, Lawyer Fabrice Orlandi said, “In democratic countries like France, it is totally unacceptable that people are arrested purely because of their philosophical thinking and that people’s freedom of expression is taken away just because of a Chinese leader’s visit. Your rights must be maintained. The path ahead could be long, but we will walk it to the end. This is the Year of the Rooster; the Rooster is symbolic of France and it also symbolizes the will to fight. Let’s hope that our fight for maintaining our rights will extend over national boundaries and reach the shores of China.”

The last speaker was the Chairman of the European Falun Gong Association. He said that Chinese culture especially emphasises a high degree of harmony in people’s hearts, coordination between human beings and their environment, as well as harmony between humanity and nature, and that self-cultivation is one of the ways to achieve this high degree of harmony. He also hoped that Falun Dafa’s principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance would bring well-being to all people around the world.