Speech by Lord Thurlow - ”The CCP’s Persecution against Falun Gong is abuse of human rights on the largest scale"

On December the 10th, International Human Rights Day, several groups staged a rally and held a press conference outside the Chinese Embassy in London to protest the CCP’s unceasing persecution of the Chinese people’s human rights. Lord Thurlow, a former senior UK diplomat, made the following speech in the press conference:

In Africa, Asia, South America and Russia there have been serious cases in which the government violated the rights of its citizens. But in terms of scale, extent and severity, the CCP surpassed the other governments. Today we are focusing our attention on the human rights issues in China to balance the media’s exaggerating reports on China’s economic and industrial developments to which foreign investments made great contributions.

The United Nations itself has recently issued a report of its sub-commission on human rights, which emphasises the gross violations that amount to terrorism by the Chinese Communist Government against its own people. The Special Rapporteur on torture problems calls it “terrorism from above.” The main focus in China is the violent assault on practitioners of Falun Gong for the last six years, assessed at one hundred million in number in 1999. The UN Working Group on contemporary forms of slavery flatly denies the CCP attempts to justify its persecution by accusing Falun Gong. On the contrary, the Working Group states that the only deaths have been at the hands of the Chinese authorities themselves, nearly three thousand deaths have been verified in detail and over four thousand four hundred cases of torture. This is only the tip of a concealed iceberg of a vastly greater death toll and daily torture on a wide scale in the slave labour camps.

Recently there has been an addition to the extensive list of officially encouraged torture methods in the form of deliberately organised rape. An evil police officer in Hebei Province recently raped a woman aged fifty one years in their attempt to scare away Falun Gong practitioners who planned to expose the facts of the torture to the UN Special Rapporteurs during their visit to Beijing.

Products made by forced labour

The forced labour in hundreds of China’s forced labour camps earns enormous profits for China. One million Chinese people were imprisoned in seven hundred labour camps, half of whom were innocent Falun Gong practitioners.

Li Heping, who was granted political asylum and now lives in U.K. Li had been illegally imprisoned in a labour camp from 2001 to 2003 due to his practice of Falun Gong. During most of his time, he was forced to make lighters and alarm clocks exported to the western markets. Annually these hand-made products earned ten million RMB for the labour camp. The labour camp was even rewarded by the Chinese authorities.

We should recognise products of this kind traded by western enterprises to lessen this kind of trading.

Has China shown any tendency to ease its human rights abuses? The western governments presumed that their routine talks with China could help improve the situation. However, the talks were followed by no action. Conversely, the persecution against Falun Gong has been escalating since Hu Jintao came to power. China still imposes strict censorship on overseas news. Chinese people could only know what the CCP intends to reveal to them, including the distorted facts of history. Only when the truth could hardly be concealed did China’s continuous cover-up of SARS and bird flu reach the public. The disastrous event when the Songhua River was seriously contaminated by benzene class chemicals was exposed only after China’s failed attempt at covering up.

At present, the foundation stone on which the communism is based has been broken. Six million Chinese people signed to quit the CCP since the publication of <> one year ago, a book to expose the CCP’s history marked by bloody violence and persecution. The defection posed a great threat to the CCP and also led to the CCP’s revengeful acts. The communist members who had made a protest were imprisoned. The condition can no longer be tolerated.