U.S. DOS Releases 2013 International Religious Freedom Report

NEW YORK — On July 29, 2014, the U.S. Department of State released its International Religious Freedom Report for 2013. The Falun Dafa Information Center welcomes the report and assistant secretary Tom Malinowski’s remarks regarding China’s persecution of Falun Gong at the press event.

It has been fifteen years since the Chinese Communist Party started persecuting the peaceful Falun Gong practice in July 1999. The 2013 report documents both individual cases as well as the systematic persecution of Falun Gong throughout China. The report also brings up the organized harassment of Falun Gong practitioners by pro-Communist groups in Hong Kong, which has undermined the policy of “One Country, Two Systems.”

While the report gives a fair amount of attention to the  ongoing persecution, it fails to address a horrific crime against humanity: the state-sanctioned organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience in China. This omission is in spite of the fact that the US DOS had briefly touched upon the crime in its annual country report on China for the past three years. Moreover, U.S. Congress has held a number of hearings on this matter over several years and, most recently, House Resolution 281, which was marked up on July 30, 2014 by the Foreign Relations Committee, specifically “calls on the Department of State to conduct a more detailed analysis of state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience in the annual Human Rights Report.”

FDI believes that the DOS report for 2013 and further exposure of state-sanctioned organ harvesting will help save innocent lives and put an end to the 15-year persecution.