(Clearwisdom.net) December 10 is International Human Rights Day, and practitioners in the New York area will hold a press conference in the plaza in front of UN headquarters and write a letter to the UN. They will call upon the UN to pay close attention to the ongoing brutal persecution of practitioners which has lasted more than 5 years, to help rescue orphans and relatives of practitioners who have been killed during the persecution, to help stop the persecution, and to support the effort to bring the chief culprit Jiang Zemin to justice.

Practitioner Feng Keran, a professor of business at New York University, said that it has been confirmed that at least 1150 practitioners have been killed during the persecution since the Jiang Zemin regime started to persecute Falun Gong in July 1999, and the persecution has resulted in more than 300 practitioners' orphans becoming homeless. He said, "Hundreds of thousands practitioners, including our relatives, are still being detained in forced labor camps, prisons and mental hospitals, where they are suffering from inhuman and brutal torture."

Professor Feng said that Jiang and his regime have used the most vicious and brutal methods in history to persecute practitioners. More than 100 torture methods have been used to force practitioners to denounce Falun Gong. The torture methods include digging bamboo sticks into fingers, hanging up and beating practitioners, long term sleep deprivation, brutal force-feeding, shocking sensitive parts of practitioners' bodies using high-voltage electric batons, rape (for example, practitioner Wei Xinyan, a 28-year-old graduate student of Chongqing University, was raped by a policeman in front of two inmates), and forcing practitioners to eat human excrement and urine (Professor Feng Guangye was tortured this way).

He said that the torture methods employed are too numerous to be counted individually. "We call on all nations to jointly condemn and help to end the brutal persecution."

Professor Feng continued, "Practitioners around the world have come to this financial capital to clarify the truth about the persecution by holding various activities such as anti-torture exhibitions. Many New Yorkers have learned the facts regarding Falun Gong and signed their names to support us. So far, practitioners have collected more than 35,000 signatures. A representative from the practitioners will deliver these signatures to the UN on Human Rights Day."

"We want to take this opportunity to request the UN to pay close attention to the ongoing, grave human rights violations against practitioners. This has lasted five years and is still happening, and we want the UN to publicly condemn the persecution and help rescue orphans and relatives of practitioners who have been persecuted to death," Keran stated.

In order to get Falun Dafa practitioners to reveal their names and addresses, the police will twist their arms back to the most extreme position, pull their hair and bang their heads against the wall. Sometimes the police will press a practitioner's head down above a toilet bucket filled with feces.