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Speech by M.P. Irwin Cotler, International Legal Counsel for Shenli Lin, at the Press Conference on Shenli Lin's Arrival in Canada
Feb. 26, 2002, on Parliament hill, Ottawa
(Transcription from recording)
(French: I want to say in beginning that we are in the presence of a great
hero of human rights.)* We are in the presence really of a real hero of human
rights, a person whose witness, testimony cannot perhaps convey the real moral
and physical courage that it took to withstand the brutal detention that he
should never have had to experience to begin with.
And indeed our delight at being here, at being in the company of Shenli Lin
on his release and his unification with his wife Jinyu Li has to be tempered by
the appreciation that he should never have been arrested to begin with, that he
should never have been subjected to this arbitrary detention, to being held
incommunicado, to coercive interrogation, to torture and beatings, to attempts
at re-education, to be deprived of the companionship of his wife as a result of
this illegal and brutal imprisonment.
And we have to understand, as Shenli Lin himself mentioned, that he is one of
thousands upon thousands who are held in similar circumstances, and the time has
come to sound the alarm because what we are witnessing is an increasing
prosecution and persecution of the Falun Gong, an increase in the arrest rates
and detention, an increase in the beatings, an increase in the torture where 30
died of torture during the month of January alone, an increase in the
criminalization of the Falun Gong through a series of bans, prohibitions, and
even attributions to them of late that they constitute not only an evil cult but
now a terrorist organization which, as Human Rights Watch put it recently in
their statement, is an "absurd and ludicrous" statement. And as they
added the notion that "the Falun Gong are a threat to public health,"
it should be understood that the only health menace is the treatment and
brutalization of them by the Chinese authorities. And so let me conclude by
saying that we call upon the Chinese authorities
It is an absurdity as false as it is absurd that those who give expression as
the Falun Gong do as a spiritual exercise meditation group to the most
fundamental values of the ancient Chinese civilization and culture, which we all
revere, should, by reason of giving expression to those values, find themselves
the objects of arrest, detentions, prosecutions, beatings and the like; and so I
would hope that the release of Shenli Lin will be the beginning of a reversal by
the Chinese authorities of this policy and practice of prosecution and
persecution that can only be called the criminalization of innocence.
Thank you.
* bracketed words spoken in French.
Posting date: 3/5/2002
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