China's Latest Olympic Shame: Over 500 Taiwan Falun Gong practitioner
were Brutally Barred Entry at Airport

A Challenge to Hong Kong and the International Community

By Terri Marsh

Human Rights Legal Foundation
Jul 03, 2007

http://en.epochtimes.com/news_images/highres/2007-6-30-dragged.jpg
Hong Kong police drag away a practitioner. (The Epoch Times)

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There has never been a more urgent need to preserve fundamental basic
rights and freedoms and the democratic system of checks and balances
than today, as over 500 persons of the Falun Gong faith have been denied
the exercise of a variety of constitutionally protected human rights
including the right to travel, the right to hold and exercise religious
and spiritual views, the right to freely associate and to peacefully
express opinions, and the right to not be discriminated against on
religious grounds due to an abuse of power by the Hong Kong Office of
Immigration and the co-extensive lack of strong steps taken by the
governments around the world against government-sponsored torture
programs in China that transcend the bounds of the law and our most
treasured human rights values and norms.

The 500 barred travelers are all citizens of Taiwan in possession of
valid visas and requisite travel documentation who clearly pose
absolutely no safety risk to Hong Kong whatsoever. Indeed, as an
application for judicial review filed with the High Court of Hong Kong
SAR maintains, the Hong Kong immigration department in collaboration
with the Chinese communist authorities have purposefully excluded all
persons of the Falun Gong faith from traveling to Hong Kong in the wake
of a lawsuit filed against Jiang Zemin, Luo Gan, and Li Lanqing for
their purportedly pivotal role in the government-sponsored torture
programs set up in China today. Lawsuits have been filed against these
three defendants in over 17 countries around the world based on the very
same allegations.

These actions were taken by reference to a blacklist of names of
presumed Falun Gong practitioners or supporters that was compiled by the
Chinese communist regime, and circulated by it to the Government of Hong
Kong. As Chen Yonglin, a former high ranking Chinese Communist Party
official involved at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party
spy network abroad, has stated, the persecution against Falun Gong
practitioners who reside outside of China includes the collection of
information about them and their activities in other countries to
prevent any form of (legal or other) protest activities against the
government-sponsored torture programs in China. To this end, the Chinese
communist authorities created these black ("no fly") lists with the help
of a network of spies who work for them around the globe.

It is this information collection and effort to prevent legal or other
types of protest that has been used to bar these 500 presumed Falun Gong
practitioners from traveling to Hong Kong to show their support of the
lawsuit filed to hold accountable those responsible for the repressive
policies of the Chinese communist authorities.

The use of blacklist collection efforts to single people out for various
forms of ill treatment has a history that goes back at least as far as
the Nazi era. Himmler's blacklists of Jewish persons living in Europe
were used by the Nazis to identify, round up, and transport six million
Jews to the concentration camps where they were subjected to forced
labor, torture, and mass extermination. The Nazi Gestapo is also known
to have compiled a list of more than 2,300 persons whose arrest was to
occur immediately after the victory of the Nazi forces. Included on the
list were Winston Churchill, Churchill's cabinet ministers, France's
former leader De Gaulle, "enemy of Germany" Lady Astor, the leadership
of British intelligence Service Robert Vansittart, and many Jewish
refugees including Dr. Sigmund Freud.

However, unlike Nazi Germany, the Hong Kong legal system like that of
all democratic states has evolved carefully structured checks and
balances that are predicated in part upon the independence of the
judicial branch of government. The "no fly" blacklists that bar entry
into Hong Kong of Falun Gong practitioners not only impose sanctions on
Falun Gong practitioners (amounting to a deprivation of their
constitutional due process rights under Hong Kong's Basic Law), making
abuses through discrimination inevitable. They also signal the
conspicuous lack of an independent judicial branch able to decide cases
and controversies without sanctions imposed upon the complainants and
their supporters.

The latest in a series of due process deprivations in Hong Kong is
especially unfortunate in light of the purpose of the transfer of Hong
Kong to China in 1994―to uphold a two-system rule rather than the
one-system rule of government that prevails in China today. This is
equally unfortunate in light of the gravity of the human rights
allegations, allegations that are being taken quite seriously by federal
courts around the world. In May of 2004, the United States Seventh
Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged the pivotal role of the former
head of state Jiang Zemin in the "mass arrests, allegedly farcical
trials, torture, forced labor, 're-education,' and killing of [Falun
Gong] members" in its opinion issued on May 27, 2004. Similarly, Judge
Octavio Araoz de Lamadrid, the chief judicial officer now presiding over
the criminal case filed in Argentina against Luo Gan, issued an opinion
in January of 2006 which held that the role of defendant Gan in these
government-sponsored torture programs was of such a serious nature as to
not permit a dismissal of the case on foreign immunity or related
grounds. Other courts including most notably the Spanish National Court
(Audencia Nacional) have applied the principles of universal
jurisdiction to cases filed against former head of state Jiang Zemin in
spite of the absence of any links between Spain and the alleged crimes,
the alleged perpetrators, or the victims, based upon the serious of the
allegations and strength of the plaintiffs' case.

While the courts around the world have upheld the principles of justice
and the legal standards created to enforce these principles, most of the
democratic countries around the world have cast a blind eye to the
ongoing government-sponsored torture programs that clearly transcend the
bounds of law and the most treasured values of all democratic states.
HRLF asks governments around the world to speak out and do what they can
do, indeed what they must do, to not only preserve fundamental
protections and checks and balances in Hong Kong, but also and just as
importantly to put an end to the government-sponsored torture in China.

Terri Marsh is executive director of the Human Rights Legal Foundation.

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