Montreal Gazette: An exercise in freedom

By Sue Montgomery

GAZETTE: A jubilant JinYu Li embraces her husband, ShenLi Lin, after his arrival at Dorval airport yesterday. Lin was imprisoned in China for two years for practicing Falun Gong.

Tuesday, February 26, 2002 For the past two years, JinYu Li faithfully wrote hundreds of letters to her husband, whom the Chinese government had imprisoned and tortured for his beliefs.

But ShenLi Lin wasn't aware of the pages filled with love and support until he stepped off a plane in Dorval yesterday and embraced the woman he had been married to for just eight months before they were forced apart.

"He's in very good shape and looks good," an elated Li said by cellphone yesterday, as the couple headed for Ottawa to prepare for a press conference today.

Li, a Canadian citizen, last saw her husband for five minutes on Dec. 26, 1999, when he was allowed to stop at home on his way from the Shanghai police station to prison.

He had been arrested for practicing Falun Gong, an exercise and meditation ritual that China outlawed in 1999.

Li was given 48 hours to leave the country. Forbidden to return to China, she had to push from Canada for her husband's release.

Shirking Obligations

Irwin Cotler, the member of Parliament who helped Li bring her husband's plight to the attention of the Canadian government, said yesterday the case is a dramatic example of how China is shirking its obligations to the human- rights conventions it has signed.

"While we're delighted with his release and reunification, we should appreciate that he should never have been arrested and detained in the first place," said Cotler, a human-rights lawyer.

Cotler said there has been a dramatic increase in the persecution of practioners of Falun Gong, which the Chinese government considers a [Jiang Zemin regime's slanderous term omitted].

The government uses propaganda to demonize practitioners in the eyes of their fellow citizens, Cotler said. There are currently thousands of people in detention.

KunLun Zhang, a dual Chinese-Canadian citizen who said he was harassed, detained, tortured, brainwashed and sentenced to three years in a Chinese labour camp for practicing Falun Gong, was released last year, after a high-profile international campaign by human-rights groups and intense, behind-the-scenes lobbying by the Canadian government.

Li, through a vigil in Ottawa, petitions and letters to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, applied the same political pressure to free her husband.

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