(Minghui.org) Ms. Na Limei of Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, was sentenced to a one-year prison term in August 2019 for refusing to renounce Falun Gong. While Ms. Na's appeal was being processed by the Railroad Transportation Intermediate Court, her daughter met with the appeals judge to request her acquittal.
The judge commented that Ms. Na's daughter was the first family member of a sentenced Falun Gong practitioner who had talked to her in person about an appeal case.
Ms. Na's daughter is calling on other practitioners' family members to talk to judges in the local trial and appeals courts to seek justice for their loved ones who have been wrongly convicted for practicing Falun Gong.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Ms. Na, 68, was arrested on November 9, 2018, during a major police sweep in Harbin and Daqing City. She has since been held at the Harbin City No. 2 Detention Center. She appeared in Railroad Transportation Court on August 7, 2019, and was sentenced to one year in prison on August 22.
Ms. Na's lawyer submitted her appeal to the Railroad Transportation Intermediate Court on September 3, and her daughter followed up by meeting with appeals judge Li Juan on September 16.
During the meeting, Ms. Na's daughter submitted her own defense argument, as well as recent cases of Falun Gong practitioners being acquitted by other courts across China.
She told Judge Li that her mother experienced many positive changes after taking up Falun Gong practice, and caused no harm to her family or society, much less undermining law enforcement as alleged by the trial court.
She also cited the “2018 Report on International Religious Freedom” published by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) on June 21, 2019, which highlighted the persecution of Falun Gong, as well as sanctions by the western countries against the human rights violators.
Judge Li frequently interrupted Ms. Na's daughter and threatened that it was dangerous for her to discuss such topics. Li also refused to talk about the lack of legal basis for the persecution and sentencing of Falun Gong practitioners.
Ms. Na's daughter said that although judge Li expressed some sympathy for her mother, she also held that Falun Gong practitioners should be sentenced for distributing information about the persecution of their faith and the bloody history of the Chinese communist regime.
Judge Li revealed that no family members of local Falun Gong practitioners who had been sentenced for their faith had ever talked to her in person about appeal cases and that Ms. Na's daughter was the first one. She promised to take a closer look at Ms. Na's case, discuss it with the collegiate bench, and provide her daughter with further updates in early October.
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