UK Government Writes to Friends of Falun Gong Europe

The following letter was received by the Friends of Falun Gong Europe from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, China Hong Kong Department


4th January 2002

Dear XX

Thank you for your letter of 4 November 2001 to the Prime Minister about the treatment of Falun Gong adherents in China. Your letter has been forwarded to us here in the China Hong Kong Department for reply.

The government has not taken a position on the nature of the Falun Gong organisation. But we have serious concerns about such human rights abuses against individual practitioners. We have made clear to the Chinese that, as the Foreign Affairs Committee pointed out in its report on China in November 2000, their actions contravene the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which China has signed, though not ratified.)

The treatment of Falun Gong adherents features prominently in our exchanges on human rights with the Chinese. During the seventh round of the UK-China Human Rights Dialogue, held in London on 19-21 November 2001, we expressed in particular our concern that leading figures in the Falun Gong movement were handed out unusually harsh prison sentences, and that there reports of the use of torture despite clear Chinese government prohibitions.

Dr McShane, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, personally raised the treatment of Falun Gong adherents with the senior Chinese Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Li Zhaoxing, during a meeting I had with him on 30 October.

We will continue to press them on this issue.

Yours sincerely

Andrew Dunkling
China Hong-Kong Department