Human Rights Attorney: Will China Continue to Violate Chinese law, international law, and the Moral Constituents of Our Humanity?

(Clearwisdom.net) Attorney Terri E. Marsh, Executive Director of Human Rights Law Foundation, a legal NGO committed to the rights of all people to be free from torture and persecution under the Declaration of Human Rights and several international treaties and covenants passed in the wake of the Holocaust of the Second World War, had this to say about the Falun Gong Appeal at Zhongnanhai:

On April 25, 1999, 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners headed for the Appeals Office in Beijing China to exercise their constitutional and legal right to appeal the arrest of some forty Falun Gong practitioners in the city of Tianjin for their peaceful appeal of a Tianjin city magazine's slanderous and ungrounded attack on the principles of the peaceful spiritual practice of Falun Gong. Upon arrival in Beijing, the practitioners were prevented from exercising their right of appeal by the Beijing police and instead placed on the street opposite Zhongnanhai. As noted by English Epoch Times Opinion Editor, Stephen Gregory, within a short time, the "inhabitants of Zhongnanhai were treated to the spectacle of 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners surrounding the complex." (available at http://www.fofg.org/news/news_story.php?doc_id=988).

As the "Falun Gong 10,000" staged a peaceful and lawful appeal against the Chinese authorities' violations of the civil and constitutional rights of other practitioners of Falun Gong, thousands upon thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in China have also been arrested, tortured, subjected to extra judicial killing for their peaceful appeal of their government's unlawful persecutory acts perpetrated against any law abiding Falun Gong practitioner who refuses to denounce and renounce the precepts and practice of Falun Gong in China. The lessons of history have unfortunately been ignored by the ruling elite in China today. The peaceful appeals staged by participants in the civil rights movement in the United States effectively taught Americans to judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Similar appeals have had the same rectifying impact, including that of Rosa Parks in the United States and of Mahatma Gandhi in India.

What is on trial in China today is not only the right of Falun Gong practitioners to exercise their right to practice their belief freely in China without persecutory reprisals that include torture and death by brutal forms of extra judicial killing. What is also on trial in China is the legal and constitutional framework of the nation itself. Will China be ruled by its own laws and constitution or will it continue to violate Chinese law, international law, and all of the moral precepts that comprise the constituents of our humanity?

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