Outstanding Teacher Ms. Ye Zhongqiu Sentenced Again

Name:Ye Zhongqiu
Gender: Female
Age: 43
Address: Liaozhong County, Shenyang City, Liaoning Province
Occupation: Teacher
Date of Most Recent Arrest: October 30th, 2010
Most Recent Place of Detention: Shenyang Brainwashing Centre
City: Shenyang
Province: Liaoning
Persecution Suffered: Detention, fired from workplace, trial

Ms. Ye Zhongqiu, a teacher from the No. 2 High School in Liaozhong Town, Shenyang City, was in charge of the Physics Group. After she began to practise Falun Gong, she became very kind-hearted and upright, and her students liked her very much in turn. At work, she was very diligent, and the scores of her students have ranked among the top.

On December 10th, 2003, Ms. Ye made use of an opportunity of students' working on a paper to clarify the facts about Falun Gong. She handed papers out to her students, which revealed the truth about Falun Gong, and the lies fabricated under Jiang Zemin's, [former leader of China and instigator of the persecution] regime. A few minutes after the papers were handed out, the principal of the school, Tian Fubao, received a report from another teacher about what Ms. Ye was doing. As a result, he closed the school, and didn't allow students to leave until they handed in their papers. On December 11th, he stopped Ms. Ye from teaching, and also put her under close surveillance. On the same day, Li Songshan from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Committee office of the Township Education Bureau came to the school and forced Ms. Ye to write down on a piece of paper that "she would be responsible for her own consequences."

On December 12th, 2003, under the cooperation of the police, Procuratorate, Judicial Committee, Political and Judicial Committee, the 610 Office (an organisation of special agents just for persecuting Falun Gong), and County Education Bureau, Ms. Ye was arrested and taken to the No. 4 Detention Centre in Shenyang City. After that, the CCP officials from Liaozhong County, closely following the orders of Jiang's regime, removed school principal Tian Fubao for not persecuting practitioners hard enough. Also, police bureau chief Li Jingzhong was removed from his position.

Ms. Ye was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and dismissed from her position at the school. Her child was young, and it impacted her a lot.

Five years of imprisonment made Ms. Ye lose her family and work. In November 2008, in order to make a living, she was tutoring a few students at home. The way she treated them was as if they were her own children. She was highly acclaimed by their parents, who all said that they felt great about leaving their children with Ms. Ye.

One morning in October 2010, when she was cooking for the students at home. Li Wei led a group of police officers from the Domestic Security Division to come to her home and arrest her. Their reason was that she gave a copy of the DVD revealing how the CCP persecuted Falun Gong to No.1 School Principal Wang Lian, who reported Ms. Ye to the police. On March 8th, 2011, without going through any legal procedure, prosecutors from the Liaozhong Court opened up the trial against her.

Ms. Ye's family hired a lawyer in Beijing to defend her with a non-guilty plea. The lawyer stated: "Distributing Falun Gong materials is not against the law. In China, there is no law stipulating that spreading Falun Gong materials is a crime; rather, it is a manifestation of a citizen's freedom of publication, speech and belief. Its content is not against the law, nor undermining the implementation of any law or administrative regulations. There is no law that stipulates that producing Falun Gong materials is a crime. As long as it is not against the law, then people should be free to do it. The public prosecutor did not list out in his charge that for defendant to hand out materials was against any law. According to the principal that 'It is not against the law if it's not stipulated in the law,' the act of handing out materials exposing the persecution of Falun Gong is not against the law, and the defendant should be set free."

The lawyer added: "We clearly know that Falun Gong practitioners are kind and innocent of any crime, so the fact that we levy charges on them itself is against the law. The judicial system is the last defence for people's conscience, morality and justice. When faced with the choices between the national law and people's conscience, we hope the court will uphold conscience and morality, be responsible to history, safeguard justice in society, make the right decision, restore the reputation of Ms. Ye and release her free of any charges against her."

The lawyer also said: "The counsel thinks the trial that the judicial department opened against Falun Gong practitioners as well as its punishments towards them, is an act sabotaging the law. What they have done is nowhere near a criminal offence, and this is an outright persecution of belief and human rights.
This is a phenomenally unjust case. People who work in the legal or judicial departments – for example, our police officers, prosecutors and judges – are being used to eradicate Falun Gong, as opposed to being a body of justice. It uses the judicial power to persecute innocent Falun Gong practitioners, which has resulted in wasting the judicial power. The government should have used its limited resources to crack down on criminals and corruption in order to safeguard taxpayers' lives, freedom and assets, as opposed to suppressing kind, honest and law-abiding citizens. These people do not do any harm to the society; on the contrary, they are beneficial to society, and their existence has added more justice and conscience to our society. If in our society, we had more Truth-Compassion-Forbearance and less Falsehood-Evil-Struggle, people would all hold themselves in the same manner as Falun Gong practitioners. This would help with the harmony and stabilisation of the society. As to the final results, we hope that the judicial department does not politicise Falun Gong cases, but judges should come up with their verdicts based on their consciences."

The just lawyer's well-founded defence made the judge and public prosecutor lower their heads in shame. They were speechless. They said that the verdict would be issued in ten days. Even the police officers from the court said that the lawyer did a great job in defending the plaintiff. Even so, under the situation where they lacked evidence and the grounds for prosecution were not solid at all, those law-enforcement officers openly defied the law and sentenced Ms. Ye to three years of imprisonment. Ms. Ye is still under detention.

People responsible for the persecution of Ms. Ye Zhongqiu:

Zhang Kun, President of Liaozhong County Police Bureau
Zhang Yongjun, Vice-President of Liaozhong County Police Bureau
Feng Dongchang, Head of the 610 Office in Liaozhong County: +86-24-87883425(Office), +86-24-87822610, +86-13804978811(Mobile)
Li Wei, in charge of Liaozhong County Domestic Security Brigade: +86-13604909119(Mobile) +86-24-87820003(Office), +86-24-87801119(Home)

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2011/11/20/249618.html