Summary of Other Articles and News - 12/23/2002

(Clearwisdom.net)

Persecution Facts

Since the end of August, the Harbin Wanjia Forced Labor Camp has applied extremely ruthless means to force Falun Gong practitioners to write the so-called "three statements". Every day, the labor camp officers forced practitioners to listen to, read, and write materials defaming Falun Dafa. Practitioners are physically tortured if they do not obey orders to renounce their belief. Every three to seven days, the camp police officers give practitioners an examination paper to slander Falun Dafa and forces practitioners to answer the questions according to their requests. Dafa practitioners are suffering both physical and mental torture every day, which makes many practitioners become absentminded.

News and Activities around the World

The Falun Dafa Association in the New South Wales Province, Australia publishes a statement opposing Article 23 of Hong Kong basic law: Article 23 breaches the "one country, two systems" policy and the promise of "keeping policies unchanged for 50 years" in the China-United Kingdom joint statement. Using the the excuse of ensuring state security, the enactment of Article 23 will suppress Hong Kong people's right to holding different political opinions from the government, having different beliefs or different consensus. This will severely harm Hong Kong's prosperity and hinder its development in many areas including politics, economics, trade, finance and culture. All people over the world who love peace, democracy and freedom absolutely do not hope that this would become a historical reality.

Open Forum

December 22 (Central News Agency) C The Greater New York sub-union of the Entire Overseas Chinese Democracy and Peace Alliance held it first "Democratic Forum" at Flushing to discuss the legislation of Article 23 of the Hong Kong basic law. Mr. Ling Feng, a political commentator who had lived in Hong Kong for 21 years pointed out serious problems existing in the legislative consultation process of the eight articles and 2 items as well as the contents of the legislation of five articles. He said, Hong Kong's current advantages depend on its free information exchange and complete and independent legal system. If Article 23 legislation suppresses all kinds of freedoms, 'would Hong Kong still be able to produce gold eggs?'

Hong Kong focus: "Seven offenses" and instruments of mental torture C Confusion about the legislation of Article 23 of basic law. According to report from RFA (Radio Free Asia) on December 20, Chinese people all over the world raised concerns for the legislation of Article 23 of the Hong Kong basic law. Its significance transcends Hong Kong itself. Recently in China, Miss Liu Di, a female student from the Beijing Normal University was arrested and imprisoned for "harming state security", which is one of the "seven offenses" defined in Article 23 of the basic law.