Letter to the UK Prime Minister from European Friends of Falun Gong

Rt. Hon. Tony Blair MP
10 Downing Street
LONDON SW1A 2AA

1st July 2005

Dear Mr Blair,

We wish to draw your attention to the serious situation of human rights abuse in China, and in particular to the plight of Falun Gong practitioners who have suffered the severest persecution at the hands of the Chinese Government since former President Jiang Zemin’s crackdown of the movement in July 1999. Approximately 2,500 practitioners have been tortured to death by the Chinese authorities and thousands more still languish in prisons and labour camps across the country with little hope of release.

In view of the forthcoming summit in Edinburgh, at which you will have contact with Chinese President Hu Jintao, now would be an excellent opportunity to focus world attention on the situation, and to let Hu Jintao know that world opinion will not allow him to continue the persecution unchecked.

In recent months about 2.6 million people in mainland China have renounced their membership of the Chinese Communist Party, whose evil past has been completely exposed by the publication by the New York-based newspaper ‘The Epoch Times’ of the ‘Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party’, which revealed the true nature of the party’s history of repression of its people in order to hold onto power in China in a way which has mirrored other communist dictatorships around the world over the same period.

As a direct result of this publication three Chinese embassy officials in Australia have renounced their membership of the CCP and applied for political asylum , and in the last few days news has emerged from Canada that a fourth Chinese official has quit the CCP and voiced his opinion against the party’s appalling human rights record over a period of more than fifty years.

This wave of Chinese people quitting the party signifies the imminent dissolution of the CCP and the world must wake up to the fact that its power is being steadily eroded by a stream of resignations the like of which has never before been witnessed.

We would therefore greatly appreciate it if you could raise the issue of the persecution of Falun Gong in China with President Hu Jintao during the summit next week and try to make the other world leaders aware that they must not simply allow China to continue the persecution. To persuade China and the CCP to end this inhumane repression would lead to an improvement in relations between China and the rest of the world, as I am sure you would agree that a more democratic and tolerant China would sit more comfortably on the world stage, both on a political and economic level.

Your help in this matter would be very much appreciated.

Yours sincerely,

John Dee (Vice-Chairman)