Agence Télégraphique Suisse (ATS): Human Rights - Falun Gong Denounces Torture in China

Geneva (ats): Beating, burning, solitary confinement, force-feeding:

The Falun Gong movement demonstrated last Wednesday in front of the Palais des Nations in Geneva, outside the Commission on Human Rights, forms of torture to which its practitioners are victim in China.

“Every day, thousands of people in China undergo torture, because they practise Falun Gong”, said Lee Kye Ja, organizer of the demonstration. In presenting the methods used and displaying photographs of the victims, the association wished to draw attention to the fate of its Chinese adherents.

Practitioners in uniform, wearing on their backs the words “China police” pretended to beat with truncheons or to burn with irons victims dressed entirely in white and whose makeup simulated wounds.

Yet other “prisoners” were enclosed in tiny metal cages or attached to gallows, in front of the UN on the Palais des Nations. Campaigners distributed pamphlets.

2,500 deaths since 1999

Falun Gong was prohibited by Beijing in July 1999. Since then, hundreds of thousands have been imprisoned, and interned in mental hospitals or forced labour camps. In five years, 2,500 people have died from torture, said the association.

Moreover, children of Falun Gong practitioners increasingly fall victim to the persecution, emphasised its spokesperson. Expelled from school and separated from their parents, minors are also locked up in asylums or orphanages, where they suffer physical abuse, she said.

For the past two years, Falun Gong associations worldwide have filed lawsuits for Torture, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity against the Chinese perpetrators, including former President Jiang Zemin.

Falun Gong, a “traditional Chinese method of meditation”, claims 100 million practitioners in China. [...]