(Minghui.org) After more than two years of incommunicado detention, a man from Hanyin County, Shaanxi Province, was secretly sentenced to five years for his faith in Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Mr. Kuang Dongliang, 45, has been repeatedly targeted for his faith during the past 20 years. He was given two and a half years of forced labor after he was arrested in January 2000 for appealing for the right to practice Falun Gong in Beijing. The authorities repeatedly harassed him after he was released. He was forced to leave home in 2005 and moved from place to place in the years that followed.
Mr. Kang finally returned to Hanyin to visit his parents on September 26, 2017. He was arrested the following day while trying to get his ID and household registration card processed at the local police station. He had planned to get the ID and household registration paperwork so his son could enroll in the local school.
He appeared in Hanyin County Court twice, first on September 27, 2018, and then on May 6, 2019. He acted as his own lawyer and argued that no law in China ever criminalizes Falun Gong and that no evidence existed to show he had “undermined law enforcement,” the standard pretext used to frame Falun Gong practitioners.
Li Xiaojie, the Hanyin County Court judge in charge of the case, told Mr. Kuang on June 10, 2019, that they had transferred his case to the local appeals court because he was “unable to make a decision.”
Mr. Kuang’s parents and wife repeatedly demanded to visit him at Hanyin County Detention Center but were turned away each time. Meanwhile, many detainees released from the detention center came to visit his parents and said that Mr. Kuang was a truly good person and they all respected him.
When Mr. Kuang’s parents, in their 70s, went to the detention center on January 4, 2020, to deposit living expenses for him, they learned that he had been sentenced to five years. The detention center finally allowed them to visit Mr. Kuang a week later.
Mr. Kuang’s parents also called judge Li and asked him why they weren't informed of his trial or told the legal basis for his prison sentence. Li replied that the appeals court instructed his trial court to issue the conviction based on orders from the Domestic Security Division and 610 Office, an extralegal agency created to persecute Falun Gong.