Hungary: Raising Awareness of the Persecution of Falun Gong at 2019 World Conference on Traditional Chinese Medicine

Falun Gong practitioners in Hungary held two days of activities outside the venue for the 2019 World Conference on Traditional Chinese Medicine, at the Budapest Congress Centre on November 8 and November 9, 2019. The event attracted Chinese medical doctors and academics from all over the world, including China.

Practitioners introduced Falun Gong to conference participants as they passed by and spoke with them about the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) 20-year-long campaign of persecution, including the state-sanctioned organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners. Practitioners collected hundreds of signatures over the two days.

Falun Gong practitioners demonstrate the exercises outside the 2019 World Conference on Traditional Chinese Medicine at the Budapest Congress Centre

Director of the Hungarian Falun Dafa Association Dr. Eszter Fricskó wrote an open letter to coincide with the event calling on Parliamentary Secretary of State of the Ministry of Human Resources Bence Rétvári to publicly express concern for Falun Gong practitioners who are being unlawfully detained, abused, and even killed for their organs in China.

Passersby paused to accept fliers, talk with the practitioners, and sign the petition. Many Chinese conference participants paused in front of practitioners' banners, read the posters and took photos.

A senior gentleman was taking a break during the conference and spoke with practitioners. He had visited Beijing in late 1990s and felt that at that time the CCP had started to relax its control of people. But after reading the flyers practitioners were distributing, he said he realized that the CCP's trampling of human rights had never ceased, and was in fact even worse than before.

During the last day of the conference, a lady walked from the event venue straight over to the signature-collection table and said that some participants had told her there was signature-collection outside calling for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong in China. She signed the petition to show her support for practitioners' efforts.

A steady stream of conference participants came over that afternoon and signed the petition. A Chinese participant asked practitioners to help him renounce his membership in the Communist Party organizations that he had joined.