More Details of MEP Marco Pannella`s Question to the European Commission on the Persecution against Falun Gong in China

Marco Pannella MEP

CHINA: PANNELLA, TABLED A PARLIAMENTARY QUESTION TO THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION ON THE PERSECUTION AGAINST FALUN GONG PRACTITIONERS

Strasbourg, March 13, 2003

The Hon. Marco Pannella, MEP, today tabled a question to the European Commission regarding the repression of Falun Gong by the Chinese Communist regime.

Pannella denounces the fact that the "crusade" launched by Jang Zemin in 1999 now affects 100 million followers of Falun Gong, and has already led to hundreds of deaths, thousands of barbaric episodes of torture and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of people, as denounced by Amnesty International, the Human Rights Watch and the Falun Dafa Center of New York.

Pannella calls on the European Commission to monitor this growing sequence of human rights abuses adequately and to specify what concrete steps it intends to take to urge the Beijing government to put an end to this repression.

PARLIAMENTARY QUESTION TO THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION ON REPRESSION AND KILLINGS OF FALUN GONG PRACTITIONERS IN CHINA

Considering that since 1999:

- according to public and well-known information provided by the Falun Dafa Information Centre, Amnesty International and other major international and national NGOs, Mr. Jiang Zemin, the leader of China, has begun the persecution of the more than 100 million people Falun Gong practitioners;

- the Falun Dafa Information Centre has verified details of 578 deaths of Falun Gong practitioners provoked by Chinese authorities; That Government officials inside China, however, report that the actual death toll is well over 1,600, while expert sources estimate that figure to be much higher; That many of these deaths are provoked by terrible systems of torture, like forced feeding, by the use of lethal drugs or fierce beatings;

- hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been detained, with more than 100,000 being sentenced to forced labour camps, typically without trial.

Considering that:

- on February 6, 2003, Mrs. Liu Jie, a 37-year-old woman practitioner, while distributing New Year greeting cards in the Shuangcheng City in Heilongjiang Province, with the characters "Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance" -- the guiding principles of Falun Dafa -- to people from their own mini-van, she and her husband were reported to the police, who then took away the couple and their van

- more specifically, on February 17, 2003, the police informed Ms. Liu's family of her death and that Ms. Liu's family members say she was probably tortured to death days before February 17.

Calls on the European Commission to know:

What information does the Commission have on the general situation of the persecution on the Falun Gong practitioners in China since 1999 and on the above-mentioned cases?

What steps has the Commission taken or does it plan to take to urge the Chinese authorities to proceed to the immediate and unconditional release of all the followers of the Falun Gong practice and to suppress all the criminal and administrative laws that undermine the freedom of religion in the People's Republic of China?"