(Minghui.org) Ms. Ma Ling was recently informed that the Kunming City Intermediate Court has accepted her appeal against the Yunnan Province Social Security Office and Yunnan University for withholding her pension, on February 19, 2021.
Ms. Ma, a 64-year-old Kunming City, Yunnan Province resident, retired from Yunnan University Library in October 2012. She was arrested in April 2014 for practicing Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
The Wuhua District Court sentenced Ms. Ma to four years in December 2014. One month later, the Yunnan Province Social Security Office stopped her pension, with the excuse that she wasn’t entitled to any payments during her term.
The pension suspension continued until May 2018, one month after Ms. Ma was released. In the next one and a half years, she was issued a monthly pension payment of 2,002.76 yuan, only half of her projected monthly pension.
Ms. Ma filed a complaint against the Yunnan Province Social Security Office in December 2019 and demanded that they return all the funds withheld from her. Instead of addressing her demand, the social security office stopped issuing her pension that same month and had Yunnan University give out the same 2,002.76 yuan to her each month as a “living stipend,” but not a pension anymore. (In China, employer-sponsored living stipends are at the discretion of the employer, while social security pension benefits are entitled to more legal protections.)
After a year of litigation, the Guandu District Court rejected Ms. Ma’s case in December 2020, with the excuse that she had never tried to resolve the issue with the defendants before filing her complaint.
Ms. Ma argued that she has filed several appeals with the Yunnan Province Social Security Office, but judge Zhu Rong only considered those as petitions, not legal appeals with the agency itself.
Ms. Ma appealed the case with the Kunming City Intermediate Court on January 3, 2021. The intermediate court accepted her case on February 19. It is scheduled to make a decision about the case in three months.
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