BBC Monitoring: Falun Gong [practitioners] continue Hong Kong protest

07/01/2002

Excerpt from report by Radio TV Hong Kong audio web site on 1 July

About 100 Falun Gong [practitioners] continued their sit-in outside Immigration Tower. They displayed banners calling on President Jiang Zemin to stop the persecution of practitioners on the mainland.

They also complained that the place allocated to them for their protest was out of the sight of the venue for the fifth anniversary [of the handover] celebrations. They said it was another sign that Hong Kong's freedoms of expression and religious belief were slowly being eroded. Their spokeswoman is Sharon Xu:

[Xu] The Hong Kong SAR [special administrative region] government has been under a lot of pressure, restricting or even banning the group here, and I think that kind of pressure gets reflected in a lot of things that they do with us.

For instance, we have been trying to rent a public venue to hold a conference from the government. It was never successful. This time we had, I think, close to 100 practitioners overseas trying to come in and attend our activities, and they were barred from entering the territory. And basically this is a repeat of last year's incident where about 91 practitioners were refused entry. So all these [things] are telling us that the freedoms of Hong Kong that Hong Kong people are so proud of [are] really deteriorating. [End of recording]

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