(Minghui.org) Engineer Mr. Meng Liqiang was arrested in August 2015 after he filed a criminal complaint against former Chinese dictator Jiang Zemin for the persecution of Falun Gong.

Mr. Meng, from Linfen City in Shanxi Province, will face an illegal trial in Yaodu District Court on April 26, 2016. Mr. Meng has been held in a forced labor camp twice, for a total of six years, for practicing Falun Gong.

Mr. Meng nonetheless filed criminal charges against Jiang Zemin for the persecution he endured, after China's Supreme People's Court announced on May 1, 2015, that “all complaints will be placed on file for investigation.”

Officers from the Xijie Police Station and the Linfen City Domestic Security Division broke into Mr. Meng's home on August 7, 2015. They took Mr. Meng and his wife Ms. Xu Yuping, a professor at Shanxi Teachers' University, to the Yaodu District Detention Center. Ms. Xu was released after 38 days, on September 16, 2015.

Mr. Meng was detained for four months before being indicted by the Yaodu District Procuratorate on December 18, 2015.

Multiple Arrests and Forced Labor

Mr. Meng was arrested in December 1999, several months after the persecution of Falun Gong was first launched, because he did the Falun Gong exercises in public. He was held in Linfen City Detention Center for 13 months.

After refusing to give up practicing Falun Gong, he was taken to a another forced labor camp for two years. He still insisted on practicing Falun Gong in the labor camp, and was beaten, shocked with electric batons, and handcuffed behind his back for extended periods. To protest the torture, he went on a hunger strike for 28 days, but was subjected to more brutal treatment.

Mr. Meng was out distributing informational materials about Falun Gong on July 10, 2004, when someone reported him to the police. His home was ransacked and he was taken to Linfen Detention Center the same night. He was subsequently transferred to a forced labor camp where he was detained for three years.

Torture reenactment: Handcuffed behind the back

Background

In 1999, Jiang Zemin, the then head of the Chinese Communist Party, overrode other members of the Politburo Standing Committee and launched the violent suppression of Falun Gong.

The persecution has led to the deaths of many Falun Gong practitioners over the last 16 years. Countless practitioners have been tortured for their belief and killed for their organs. Jiang Zemin is directly responsible for the inception and continuation of the brutal persecution.

Under his personal direction, the communist regime established an extralegal security organization, the 610 Office, on June 10, 1999. This organization overrides police forces and the judicial system to carry out Jiang's directives regarding Falun Gong: ruin their reputations, cut off their financial resources, and destroy them physically.

Chinese law allows its citizens to be plaintiffs in criminal cases, and many practitioners are now exercising their right to file criminal complaints against the former dictator.