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

• to rescind their illegal ban on the Falun Gong;
• to repeal all legislation that purports to criminalize them and to in effect to put them beyond the pale;
• to cease and desist from any policy and practice of torture or any cruel and unusual punishment in detention or otherwise;
• to cease and desist from any attempts at forced "re-education" in labor camps, psychiatric facilities and the like; and
• to release all those who are now being unjustly held in detention in whatever facility they may be held and
• to restore the Falun Gong to be able to participate in exactly what the Chinese authorities themselves purport to espouse, namely the values of truth, compassion and forbearance.

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.