The Australian: Chinese dissident lawyer Gao Zhisheng’s family defects to US
THE family of Chinese rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who has been tipped for a Nobel Peace Prize and disappeared weeks ago, has defected to the US.
Information Centre
THE family of Chinese rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who has been tipped for a Nobel Peace Prize and disappeared weeks ago, has defected to the US.
William (Kui) Huang is one of the people who spent their youth cutting open [pistachio] nut shells with pliers. During an interview he told me that he had to work at least sixteen hours a day. The work was done in Cell No. 27 of Zhuhai 2nd Detention Center, which according to Huang was less than twenty square meters in size and was home to over twenty people.
It is now clear that the Beijing Olympics Games did not help to improve human rights in China. On the contrary, unknown thousands of innocent people have fallen victim to the Beijing Olympics. Knowing that it had the Olympics secured, the Chinese regime not only refused to honor the promise it made to improve human rights when it bid for the 2008 Olympic Games,1 but it used the Olympics’ security as a pretext to apprehend, torture, and murder people who had already suffered prolonged human rights violations in China.
An elderly resident of the city of Tianjin was sentenced earlier this month to over one year in a labor camp after police found her distributing leaflets about Falun Gong. She is one of 15 local adherents sentenced in recent months to this particular camp and is at grave risk of torture, the Falun Dafa Information Center reported.
After two long years of imprisonment and Amnesty International campaigning, Chinese
prisoner of conscience Bu Dongwei was finally released on 18 July 2008. Bu Dongwei was serving time in a ‘re-education through labour’ facility for allegedly possessing Falun Gong materials. For fear of again be detained or harrassed in Olympic crackdowns, Amnesty International was unable to make public the news of his release until now.
Falun Gong practitioners were invited to participate in the Fisher’s Ghost
Parade at the Campbelltown City Festival on the afternoon of November 1, 2008.
More than one hundred different groups participated in this annual parade.
The Immigration Department is endangering failed Falun Gong asylum seekers
by forcing them to apply for travel documents from the Chinese consulate in
Sydney, exposing their status to authorities and putting them in danger of persecution,
refugee advocates say.
Human rights groups’ statements submitted to the United Nations Committee against
Torture prior to the body’s review of China on Friday highlight the continued
torture and death in custody of Falun Gong adherents.
There has been an attempt to bring criminal charges against a high ranking Chinese
official (Zhou Yongkang), who is due to meet Prime Minister Kevin Rudd while visiting
Australia.
One of the four senior Chinese officials responsible for the
persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China, Zhou Yongkang, is arriving in
Sydney today upon invitation by the Australian Government.