(Clearwisdom.net) New York-based Falun Dafa Information Center (FDIC) held a press conference on the afternoon of April 26, 2010 in the U.S. Capitol Building to release its 2010 Annual Report. The report recorded in detail the persecution of Falun Gong in China, and its impact on China and the whole world. Human rights lawyers, scholars, experts on human rights issues and victims of the persecution, based on their independent investigation and evidence collected, exposed the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) brutal persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in the past eleven years.
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Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institution's Center for Religious Freedom and commissioner with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, hosted the press conference. She said, "April 25 eleven years ago, Falun Gong appeared on the world stage as 10,000 practitioners gathered peacefully in Beijing to request an end to escalating harassment. Three months later, the Chinese Communist Party launched a campaign to "eradicate" the spiritual practice, bringing forth what members of the U.S. Congress termed in 2009 "one of the most unjust and cruel persecutions of our time." [Quotes from FDI website]
"Today, Falun Gong remains one of the least understood, yet most severely persecuted groups in China. Millions continue to face the threat of detention, torture, and death because of their religious identity," said Shea.
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Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center, presented an overview of the just released 2010 Annual Report. He said that the information collected by the report drew on a wide range of sources. "These included first-hand accounts from practitioners, their families, and human rights lawyers, Chinese government websites, foreign media reports, research by Amnesty International, and a thorough study by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC)."
Browde said that tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners continue to face "lawlessness and brutality" in Mainland China simply because of their belief. Their life, work, study, pension and physical freedom are under threat on a daily basis. The persecution launched by the Chinese Communist regime is illegal, and goes against Chinese Constitution and the International Law.
The report documented that 109 Falun Gong practitioners died in 2009 as a result of torture and abuse in China, and over 2,000 more who were sentenced arbitrarily to forced labor or prison. Over half of the detainees in the forced labor camps are Falun Gong practitioners.
Browde said that these are only some figures, but behind each figure are the families of the victims who have great courage, because the revelation of the death of their loved ones may lead to further abuse by the Communist authorities and even imprisonment.
The annual report pointed out that many of the lawyers known to represent Falun Gong practitioners faced escalating harassment, monitoring, disbarment, and even detention or torture at the hands of the authorities. Lawyer Gao Zhisheng mysteriously disappeared in February 2009 and remained missing at year's end. Two other lawyers, Tang Jitian and Liu Wei--who have collectively represented at least 20 practitioners in recent years--currently face permanent disbarment for defending a Falun Gong practitioner in Sichuan province in early 2009.
Browde said that the media coverage and the reports from the human rights groups are far from revealing the scale and terror nature of the persecution.
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Ethan Gutmann, author of a forthcoming book on Falun Gong, Losing the New China, said that the circumstances on the very day of the April 25 appeal were much more complicated than what people have learned. According to Mr. Hao Fengjun, former officer of the 610 Office, the Chinese Communist regime had been monitoring and harassing Falun Gong practitioners prior to the April 25 incident. They had collected detailed information on every practitioner and their families. This information could not have been collected in just a few days.
Gutmann revealed a great deal of evidence he had collected about the Chinese Communist regime's persecution of Falun Gong, including using the Golden Shield Project to monitor online chatting, monitoring emails, and confirming Falun Gong practitioners' IP addresses and then arresting them. The Chinese Communist regime also attacked the Minghui website [Chinese version of Clearwisdom], used special agents to collect information about Falun Gong practitioners overseas, and the regime's accomplices slandered and assaulted practitioners in New York's Flushing Chinatown.
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Dr. Shiyu Zhou, deputy director of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium and professor of computer engineering at Rutgers University said that since 2001, the Golden Shield Project that the Chinese Communist regime invested over 10 billion US dollars to build up and the anti-blockade tools created by Falun Gong practitioners have carried out a fierce contest. The Global Internet Freedom Consortium has become considerably mature as of 2006, and its anti-blockade technology has the upper hand. Dr. Zhou said, "With each US dollar we spent, the regime would have to invest human and material resources worth over hundreds or even thousands US dollars to compete."
Dr. Zhou added that the regime was so exasperated that it used shady tactics to strike at those who help Chinese people access free information. He showed two photos on which Dr. Li Yuan, technical director of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, was severely beaten by a group of the Chinese Communist regime's special agents at his home in the suburbs of Atlanta. Those people stole two of his laptop computers and some documents.
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David Matas, a Canadian human rights and immigration attorney, co-author of Bloody Harvest, the killing of Falun Gong for their organs, and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee, discussed the evidence that the Chinese Communist regime harvests Falun Gong practitioners' organs for profit.
According to Matas' estimation, about 9,000 Falun Gong practitioners were killed in the process of removing their corneas, lungs, livers, kidneys and skin each year.
The report was co-authored by David Matas and David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific, who started an investigation in 2006 regarding the allegation of organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners. They traveled to 44 countries in Europe, Asia, America and Australia, and completed an investigation report in two years. The report's 57 pieces of evidence confirmed that a systematic seizure of Falun Gong practitioners' organs is happening in China. The report's 3rd edition was published in October 2009 as a book entitled Bloody Harvest, the killing of Falun Gong for their organs.
FDI spokesman Levi Browde said that in addition to the recently passed U.S. House Resolution 605 that calls for the end of the persecution of Falun Gong, another sign of hope is that judges in Spain and Argentina found several sitting and former Communist Party officials--including ex-leader Jiang Zemin--liable for torture, crimes against humanity, and genocide for their role in the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.
Nina Shea said in her concluding remarks that the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom will release its annual report on April 29 at the National Press Club, and it will once again list China as one of the "countries of particular concern" over religious liberty.
