A cross-party group of MPs have voiced their support for Falun Gong practitioners in London marking the spiritual group’s 24-year effort to persevere under the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) suppression.
Conservative MP Paul Bristow and Labour’s shadow minister Ian Murray said all people should enjoy “the freedom to practice, change, or share one’s faith or belief without discrimination or violent opposition.”
A number of SNP MPs voice solidarity with the suppressed group, and Liberal Democrats’ foreign affairs spokesperson Layla Moran said the party will continue to urge the government to promote and protect human rights and the rule of law.
Human rights lawyer David Matas, one of the first investigators into the allegations of forced organ harvesting in China, said the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) demonization of Falun Gong led to the depersonalisation of its practitioners, which in turn led to the mass killing of the practitioners for their organs.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline that promotes the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.
Originating in China in 1992, Falun Gong attracted some 70 million practitioners, according to official estimates, before former Chinese regime leader Jiang Zemin turned the party apparatus against the practice.
Since then, practitioners in China have been subjected to detention in prisons, labour camps, and mental hospitals. They have also been targets of social exclusion, sexual violation, and torture, which in some cases were fatal.
The mass detention of Falun Gong practitioners allegedly enabled a state-sanctioned organ transplant industry, in which “a prisoner who is the best match for the paying recipient is chosen from a large pool of detainees” and killed for their organs, according to the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China.
Arrested From Home Ahead of Beijing Olympics
Some of the evidence of forced organ harvesting is that “detainees from ethnic, linguistic, or religious minorities may be forcibly subjected to blood tests and organ examinations such as ultrasound and x-rays, without their informed consent; while other prisoners are not required to undergo such examinations,” according to U.N. experts.The waiting time for an organ transplant in China, often counted in weeks, is also unheard of in other countries’ organ donation systems, in which a patient can wait for years for a match.
Han Fei, a Falun Gong practitioner who recently moved to the UK, told NTD that she had her blood taken a number of times during her imprisonment between 2008 and 2010.
“I think it’s related to forced organ harvesting,” Ms. Han said. “I was arrested in 2008. Back in 2006, my colleague said he saw a poster about organ transplant on a hospital window, and [the advertised waiting time was] within a week, he told me this.
“I knew of forced organ harvesting at the time, I thought this must be it. How [else] can you get a matching organ in such a short time? Within a week? The advertisement was in the hospital,” Ms. Han added.
Ms. Han was taken away from her home on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, she said.
Four police officers went to her home in Beijing at around 9 p.m. to check whether she was still practicing Falun Gong. Failing to get an answer, the police searched her home after midnight, taking away all Falun Gong-related books and materials, and Ms. Han herself. She was later sent to a labour camp until May 2010.
Ms. Han said she was subjected to “endless work in the labour camp. Making Q-tips, bagging tea, moving soybeans, farming, growing beans, sweet potatoes ... we’ve also made clothes.”
She was said she was beaten during another brief detainment in 2020 and monitored at her home following another detention in 2019.
Liu Pintong, a Falun Gong practitioner in China who previously served an eight-year sentence, has been arrested again in February for handing out leaflets about the persecution.
Her son Hu Xuanming, a postgraduate student studying in London, told The Epoch Times that his aunt was summoned as a witness, only to be denied entry to the courtroom when the hearing occurred. Ms. Liu is now awaiting her sentence.
Dehumanisation
According to Falun Dafa Infocenter, the persecution officially began on July 20, 1999, when practitioners across China were arrested in the middle of the night.In a document banning CCP members from practicing Falun Gong, the party’s central committee has said the practice “fundamentally contradicts” Marxist theory, which is atheistic or antitheistic in nature.
The start of the suppression was also accompanied by an around-the-clock media campaign to discredit and demonise Falun Gong practitioners.
Mr. Matas said the propaganda campaign is in part responsible for the mass killing of Falun Gong for their organs.
“This vilification led to depersonalization of the practitioners. Prison guards, health officials and health professionals felt that they could do what they wanted with practitioners, that practitioners were not really human,” he said.
“We can see this hatred from the extreme propaganda directed against Falun Gong. We can also hear this from those who got out of prison and out of China. They tell us not only how horribly they have been treated but also the nonhuman manner in which their victimizers viewed them.”
Mr. Bristow said the UK is “deeply concerned about the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and other groups in China.
“The testimonies of their experiences are incredibly distressing and their treatment is one of many reasons why China is one of 31 human rights priority countries for the UK,” the MP said.
Labour MP Rupa Huq said she’s pleased that the UK passed a law last year banning citizens and residents from buying organs abroad, and that she will “continue to press the UK Government to send a clear message that we will not stand by and we will not tolerate such gross abuses of human rights.
SNP MP Tommy Sheppard called the CCP’s suppression against Falun Gong “deplorable persecution” to “eradicate those that observe the spiritual discipline,” and said China “must respect the universal human rights to freedom of expression and religion.”
Ms. Moran said: “Please rest assured that this issue is very important to me.”
She added the Liberal Democrats will continue to urge the government to “use the UK’s influence and foreign policy to promote and protect these values” and to commit to a more comprehensive assessment of UK-Sino relations.”
