(Clearwisdom.net) On December 15 and 16, a symposium entitled "Ten Years after the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna" was held in the United Nations Hall in Bangkok, Thailand. Attending the symposium were over 100 people from various NGOs and human rights organizations from Australia, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Denmark, India, Bengal, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma, Mongolia, Holland, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, North Korea, and Vietnam. Representatives of Falun Gong practitioners in Thailand were also present.
During the discussion of the human rights conditions in the Asia-Pacific region after the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action was established in 1993, a practitioner introduced the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. She pointed out that the persecution has extended outside of China, especially in Thailand.
She listed the human rights violations of Falun Gong practitioners by the Thai government under the pressure from Jiang's regime. For example, Falun Gong practitioners were not granted permission to hold experience sharing conferences and photo exhibitions. A TV program intended to have practitioners exposing the staged Tiananmen Self-Immolation Incident was also cancelled. Not long ago, Falun Gong practitioner Pirjo Svensson from Sweden was illegally detained when she came to Thailand to visit her husband who was working there. She was arrested simply because she wanted to tell people the facts of the persecution. Later she was deported from Thailand. When she tried to apply for a visa to come to Thailand again to reunite with her husband, she was denied the visa. At present she is still forced to be separate from her husband. Another practitioner, Zhen Hanfei, from Singapore had planned to come to Thailand to marry her fiancé, but was denied entrance because she was on the blacklist. She still cannot get married. All these cases are examples of violations of Falun Gong practitioners' human rights.
During the conference, Falun Gong practitioners also distributed brochures introducing Falun Gong and explaining the facts of the persecution to attendants. On the afternoon of the 15th, a UN officer disallowed practitioners to place photos and other materials showing the persecution of Falun Gong on the tables in the conference room. This incident that happened inside the United Nations Hall was yet another human rights violation, which was the result of pressure from Jiang's regime.
The practitoner called upon the international community to help rescue the Falun Gong practitioners detained in China and bring an end to the persecution.
2003-12-17