(Please see an earlier related report on http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2003/8/9/38970.html.)
Plenary Meeting, Monday, 4 August 2003
Item 6: Specific human rights issues:
(a) Women and human rights
Madam Chairperson,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
On behalf of Interfaith International, I thank you for giving us the floor.
In China, inhuman torture against women who practise Falun Gong still continues. FalunáGong is a traditional Chinese method of meditation and health improvement based on the universal principles of Truth, Benevolence and Tolerance.
The persecution directed over the past four years by JiangáZemin, ex-President of China, has become increasingly barbaric.
In forced labour camps, guards say to Falun Gong practitioners: "You say you practise tolerance? Can you then tolerate if I rape you?" They tear off their clothes in public and hit them with truncheons; they use metal wire to pierce their nipples; they insert toothbrushes into their vaginas or shock them with electric batons.
In Masanjia labour camp, for example, 18 practitioners were forcibly stripped and thrown into the men's cells.
In Beijing, the police did not hesitate to rape publicly a young student. Zhao Jing, another young woman of 19, was beaten to death.
In Jilin province, Mrs Wang Minli was sent to hospital after having been physically beaten by the police. To prevent her from speaking out about her torture they cut her windpipe at the hospital and the police then said to her family that she had thrown herself from the top of a building and that her windpipe had been cut open for medical reasons.
These few examples represent only a very small part of the many forms of torture and abuse to which women of all ages are subjected. How many, in fact, have been beaten to death or to a state of permanent disability, have been raped, arrested, sent to "re-education" camps or mental hospitals and forced to undergo brainwashing? How many have been force-fed with human excrement? How many, in actual fact, have lost their lives through savage torture? How many have been sacked from their jobs, left without money, without a home and separated from their children and their loved ones?
At Tiananmen Square, children and women from 4 to 80 years have been beaten for saying "Falun Dafa Hao," that is to say "Falun Gong is good." A little girl clinging to her mother was smacked and thrown with her mother into a police car; a woman six months pregnant was savagely beaten, etc.
Another example: a woman seven months pregnant could not be sent to a forced labour camp because she was expecting a child. The baby was killed in the womb of its mother and she was immediately sent to a labour camp.
This barbaric persecution occurs every day in China.
Moreover, women living outside of China who come to visit their families are now arrested illegally and sent directly to detention centres or to forced labour camps.
Mrs Chen Xi of Taiwan, for example, is being illegally held in the town of Shenzhen. We have just learned that she has been sentenced to a four-year prison term for having distributed leaflets about the persecution outside the University of Shenzhen.
Miss Li Meizi, a permanent resident of the United States, has been sentenced to a two-year term of forced labour because, in November 2002, the police, after having raided the home of the friends she was visiting, found in her handbag two leaflets that told the truth about the persecution.
It is not difficult to imagine the daily suffering of these women!
But, for the first time, the wind of change is blowing: The voices of the victims are being heard by Justice.
A lawsuit is in process since October 2002 in Chicago (Illinois, USA) against JiangáZemin and the main executioners of this repression. They are accused of:
In addition, Falun Gong associations worldwide, together with the international NGO based in Switzerland, TRIAL ("Track Impunity Always"), have established an international network of lawyers specializing in human rights. This team aims to bring to trial all those who are responsible.
Madam Chairperson, Ladies and Gentlemen, we request the intervention of the Sub-Commission, to bring to an end this persecution and to show its support in order to help these women to take their case to court and to bring the legal proceedings already under way to a just conclusion.
The victims are now taking legal action not only to bring this repression to an end but also to protect the dignity and the fundamental freedoms of women worldwide.
We thank you sincerely for your attention.