May 4, 2006
Two weeks after Chinese President Hu Jintao was welcomed to the U.S., China joined a list of 11 countries recommended to the Bush administration as deserving of a diplomatic response for engaging in or tolerating systematic and egregious violations of religious freedom.
Along with China, the Congress-established U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Burma, Eritrea, Sudan, Vietnam, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan as the world's worst violators of religious freedom.
The law that created the USCIRF in 1998 requires the president to name the worst violators of religious freedom and take specific policy actions, ranging in severity from a quiet demarche to economic sanctions.
[...]
After sending a delegation to China last August, the commission found religious-freedom conditions in the communist country to be poor.
The USCIRF said in its 2006 report released today that "every religious community in China is subject to serious restrictions, state control, and repression."
The most severe abuses are directed against Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims, Roman Catholics, house church and unregistered Protestants and spiritual groups such as the Falun Gong, the report said.
The abuses include "imprisonment, torture and other forms of ill treatment."
During Hu's speech on the South Lawn of the White House April 20, a woman protesting the government's abuse of the Falun Gong managed to get into the press area and shout, "President Hu, your days are numbered." [Editor's note: it should be "your time is running out."]
The commission noted that while the Chinese government issued a new Ordinance on Religion in March 2005, "its provisions, in fact, restrict rather than protect religious freedom, offering party leaders more extensive control over all religious groups and their activities."
"Prominent religious leaders and others continue to be confined, imprisoned, tortured, 'disappeared' and subjected to other forms of ill treatment on account of their religion or belief," the commission report said.
[...]
Source http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50039
Category: Falun Dafa in the Media