Open Letter From European Parliament Vice President Edward McMillan-Scott
TO:
H.E. Ban Ki-moon
Secretary-General
United Nations
New York, April 25, 2009
Dear Secretary-General:
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the most systematic persecution of one group since the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
As a European Parliament vice president and longest-serving member of its Foreign Affairs Committee, I have for three years campaigned to draw attention to the brutal and systematic persecution by the Chinese regime of practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddha-school spiritual movement with, at one time, 70 to 100 million adherents.
They have been persecuted—simply because Falun Gong is popular—by the most paranoid, brutal, and arbitrary regime in world history, which has killed 70 million of its own people, 38 million through deliberate starvation.
I write to urge you to initiate an inquiry into the systematic process of imprisonment without trial, escalating torture, and the murder of thousands of innocent people under torture. This goes beyond man’s inhumanity to man: It amounts to genocide under Article 2 of the Genocide Convention. The age of impunity is over, and those who know what is taking place in China look to you to take action.
As U.S. Supreme Court Judge Felix Frankfurter said when told in 1942 by the Pole Jan Karski of what was happening in the Nazi death camps, “I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.”
Secretary-General, there is plenty of evidence of genocide in China if only you would care to look or to listen to the U.N. rapporteurs on torture and religious freedom.
