Canadian Court Rejects Newspaper's Appeal and continues to Forbid it to Publish Defamatory Articles about Falun Gong

On January 7, 2002, the Superior Court of the Province of Quebec held a hearing in the case of Falun Gong Practitioners vs. Les Presses Chinoises, a Chinese-language newspaper based in Montreal, Canada. The Falun Gong practitioners sued Les Presses Chinoises because it published defamatory articles attacking Falun Gong. The articles were written by malicious people parroting official Party propaganda distributed by the Chinese Embassy. The court rejected the appeal by the newspaper and upheld the original court order that forbade Les Presses Chinoises from publishing any material slandering Falun Gong.

On December 10, 2001, the court issued a mandate that "the defendant, Les Presses Chinoises, can neither accept nor publish any articles or advertisements on Falun Gong provided by the joint defendant He Bing. Also it can neither accept nor publish any other similar articles or advertisements from any other parties". For further information on this lawsuit, see “Canadian Practitioners File Law Suit Against Chinese-Language Newspaper for spreading lies about Falun Gong” - Sunday, December 23, 2001 - http://www.clearharmony.net/articles/2335.html

During the hearing today, the lawyer for Falun Gong practitioners expounded from various perspectives the damage done to Falun Gong, to practitioners in Canada and to the whole society by the hateful articles attacking Falun Gong. A request was made to the court to uphold the original order to forbid Les Presses Chinoises from publishing any materials that slandered Falun Gong. The defendants clearly knew that their appeals were unjustifiable, but they still made groundless arguments and tried to take advantage of the freedom of the press. They requested that the court invalidates the original order and allows them to publish slanderous materials.

After listening to statements from both parties, the court decided that Les Presses Chinoises' acts in publishing vicious articles against Falun Gong went far beyond the acceptable legal limit of freedom of the press and stated that such actions would not be tolerated. In this case, protecting the reputation of Falun Gong was far more important than maintaining the freedom of the press. Based on the facts listed in the indictment of Jiang Zemin's illegal, brutal persecution of Falun Gong as well as on the above reasons, the court announced in its decision at 2 P.M. It rejected all of the appeals of the defendant and continued to forbid the publication of any materials that attacked Falun Gong. The court will soon set an agenda for later hearings to completely resolve the case.

Source:
http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2002/1/15/17773.html