(Minghui.org) On March 4, 2020, the Washington D.C. based NGO Freedom House published a new report “Freedom in the World 2020.” In the report, China was listed as “one of the 15 worst-performing countries,” with only 10 out 100 points for the global freedom score.
The Freedom House report said, “China pressed ahead with one of the world’s most extreme programs of ethnic and religious persecution, and increasingly applied techniques that were first tested on minorities to the general population, and even to foreign countries. The progression illustrated how violations of minority rights erode the institutional and conventional barriers that protect freedom for all individuals in a given society.”
Since it came to power 71 years ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been suppressing the Chinese people to maintain its totalitarian power. After it ordered the persecution of Falun Gong, an ancient spiritual discipline, in 1999, the human rights status and degree of freedom have continued to decline in China.
For the past 20 consecutive years, China has been designated as a Country of Particular Concern by the U.S. for its human rights abuses.
In the press statement issued by the U.S. Department of State on December 20, 2019 titled “United States Takes Action Against Violators of Religious Freedom,” it re-designated China and several other countries as Countries of Particular Concern under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 for their having engaged in or tolerated systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom.
The U.S. government announced designations of 68 individuals and entities in nine countries for corruption and human rights abuses under the Global Magnitsky Act. Visa restrictions were placed on Chinese government and CCP officials for the violations.
“No country, entity, or individual should be able to persecute people of faith without accountability,” according to the press statement.
On January 8, 2020, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) released its 2019 report, which also stated that the human rights and rule of law conditions in China continued to worsen.
The report cited Minghui.org as saying that at least 69 Falun Gong practitioners died as a result of persecution by the CCP and at least 931 Falun Gong practitioners were unlawfully sentenced to prison in 2018.
Among these practitioners, Mr. Song Zhigang, a resident of Liaoning Province, was sentenced to 14 years in April 2018, after the police found Falun Gong-related information in his lost cellphone.
Ms. Li Ping, 49, a former executive in the Jiagedaqi Railroad Hospital in Heilongjiang Province, was sentenced to two years in prison in October 2018 for writing letters to government agencies in hopes to persuade them to stop persecuting Falun Gong.
Another practitioner, Mr. Liao Dawu from Guangxi Province, was sentenced to two years on December 28, 2018, for accompanying the husband of a detained practitioner to visit her.
In “2019 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” another report released by the U.S. Department of State on March 11, 2020, it further points to the ongoing atrocities of involuntary organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, especially Falun Gong practitioners.
The report cited one study on China's official statistics of organ donations by the Australian National University. It said that there was “highly compelling evidence” based on statistical forensics that the CCP-sanctioned data was ‘falsified.’ Moreover, the research paper argued that the government’s organ transplant program involved donations from ‘involuntary donors who are marked down as ‘citizen donors.’”
“In June the nongovernmental Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting of Prisoners of Conscience in China released a report which found ‘direct and indirect evidence of forced organ harvesting’ in China, citing ‘extraordinarily short waiting times’ and ‘massive infrastructure development of facilities and medical personnel for organ transplant operations’,” wrote the report.
“We all know the rights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness don’t just belong to Americans, they belong to everyone everywhere,” said US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo during the press conference on December 20, 2019.
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