Greetings.

As a Falun Gong practitioner, a Canadian, and a woman, I am writing to urge you, along with many other human rights and women's rights organizations, to help stop the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China.

Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) is a spiritual practice, including gentle exercises and mediation, based on the principle of Truthfulness ~ Compassion ~ Forbearance. This is the principle, considered as the highest characteristic of the universe, which all practitioners base their spiritual cultivation upon. The great courage brought about solely by following this principle has enabled them to endure all these terrible sufferings.

I am writing to your organization in particular to try and raise awareness about the persecution of female practitioners in China. These brave practitioners, arrested for exercising one of their basic human rights -- freedom of belief--are thrown into labor camps, where most have been beaten and verbally abused, many others have been raped either by guards or male inmates, and there are even reports of forced abortions. Many of these cases are well documented by groups such as Amnesty International, Rights & Democracy, and Human Rights Watch Asia.

Other cases report beatings with electric batons, forced labor, forced medication, no contact with family members, loss of financial resources, burned Falun Dafa books and other materials, and loss of homes. To date there are 114 male and female practitioners who have been killed while in police custody. These abuses occur to young children as well as elderly women. These atrocities cannot be allowed to continue.

I urge you to help stop this horror.

In less than a month the Team Canada trade mission, led by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, leaves for China. Please voice your concerns to the Canadian government and urge them to take action against this brutal persecution.

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Article 18 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 1 states:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

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Thank You,

XXX

On behalf of Canadian Female Falun Gong Practitioners

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Enclosed please find a letter from female practitioners in Mainland China, as well as a list of websites where detailed information about these abuses, reported by the media, international human rights groups, or smuggled out of China by practitioners, can be found.

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Some useful addresses:

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Call For All Women's Organizations in the World to Uphold Justice and Protect Woman's Dignity and Legal Rights

Dear Ladies of the World's Women's Unions:

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We are female Falun Dafa practitioners from Mainland China. With great indignation and expectation, we would like to report the inhuman tortures inflicted upon innocent female Falun Gong practitioners by Jiang Zemin's Government. We are looking forward to your help in upholding human rights justice for us.

During the last 18 months, the persecution carried out by the government of Jiang Zemin has been escalating. It has become more and more brutal, vicious and inhumane. In Tiananmen Square, practitioners, from 4 years old to 80 years old have been savagely beaten simply for saying out loud: "Falun Dafa is good!" A baby girl who tightly grabbed her mother's clothes was slapped in the face by the police and thrown into the police car with her mother; a woman six months pregnant was kicked so hard that she couldn't even stand up under the unbearable pain; a woman in her 70's was beaten to the ground and dragged into a police car; etc. There are more of those examples than there is space to recount them all.

In labour re-education camps, those inhuman guards act even more debased and unbridled. They claimed: "Don't you say you practice tolerance? I will see if you can tolerate it when I rape you!" They ripped off women's clothes in front of everyone and shocked them with stun batons; they used iron wire to pierce their nipples; they probed into their vaginal area with eggplants, toothbrushes and mineral water bottles. At Masanjia Labour Re-education Camp in Liaoning Province, 18 female practitioners were stripped of their clothes and forced into male prisoners' cells; at the Female Labour Re-education Camp in Jilin Province, the evil police put hot pepper powder into female practitioners' vaginal area and forced them to write "repenting letters" [meaning that they are sorry they practiced Falun Dafa and would not do it again]. At this time, these monsters even inserted the electric stun batons into women practitioners' vaginal area to electrically shock them; in Beijing, several policemen stripped a female practitioner and sexually harassed her in public; a 19 year-old female practitioner, Zhao Jing, was beaten to death after she jumped out of the bus that was escorted by police. What made people even more upset was that these animals, displaying such wicked behaviour, were rewarded and promoted by the government instead of being stopped by the law! The head of the Masanjia Labour Re-education Camp was rewarded with 50,000 Yuan [about US$6,000, average yearly wage in urban area of China is $710] by the government, and the deputy was rewarded with 30,000 Yuan, for mistreating human beings. They were also ordered to construct more cells with money supplied by the government.

Is it a sin to be a woman? Is it a sin to be able to give birth to our babies? Wasn't everyone in the world born of a woman? Haven't we been brought up by our parents? Shouldn't everyone respect women? What is the difference between stripping off the clothes of female practitioners from publicly stripping naked our own mothers, sisters and daughters? Is there any difference between insulting female practitioners and insulting our own mothers, sisters and daughters? It is only because we do not want to give up our belief in the universal principle of "Truthfulness, Benevolence, Forbearance" and because we choose to practice Falun Dafa, and follow our respected teacher, Master Li Hongzhi, that the oppressors have torn our dignity apart and insulted our pure bodies and our female human nature. We cannot bear to live with the humiliation done to us, but we could also do not choose to end our lives, either!

How many female practitioners have been expelled from their jobs, schools, and party memberships, and lost their livelihoods? How many female practitioners became destitute and homeless? How many of them were beaten, arrested and sent to labour re-education camps? How many female practitioners were beaten black and blue and even until deformed and handicapped? How many female practitioners were sent to mental hospitals and forced to take poisonous medicines and drugs? How many of them have lost their lives under the brutal tortures? Since the beginning of this outrage, among the 110 practitioners who were persecuted to death while in police custody, most of them were female! However, their families did not even have the right to file lawsuits or even speak out about this terrible injustice. The attorneys and the courts dare not to accept any Falun Gong-related lawsuits. Whoever dares to file a lawsuit against Jiang Zemin and/or his government enforcers will be arrested, beaten and sentenced! The "Constitution of the People's Republic of China" is merely a wasted piece of paper! Since July 1999, the very basic rights of citizens in China and their traditional values were all eliminated! The police are permitted to illegally search the practitioners' bodies and ransack their homes at will and get rewarded for it. They arbitrarily arrest, beat, detain, sentence and even torture and kill the practitioners! This is the true situation in this period of the 20^th and 21^st century in this modern world; this is what Jiang Zemin claims is the "best period of human rights in China's recorded history"! This is the socialist country under a so-called "legal system" led by the [...] party! This is the true situation in China as our country, with the longest history of civilization in the world, enters the 21^st Century! We have to question: which period of time in history had anything approaching brutality to this degree? Which leader in the long history of our country behaved so inhumanely? How could we and our later generations survive such a cruel and immoral dictatorship?!

For all that we have stated above, we are writing to you to ask for your help. We are asking you to uphold justice, stop the vicious persecution carried out by Jiang Zemin's government and protect the dignity and basic human rights of women everywhere, and especially in China at this critical time in history! We ask this is not only for ourselves; this is not only for our own people; this is for all the women in the world and for all of humankind! To allow the evil to exist is not only a humiliation to the Chinese people, it is also a humiliation to the whole human race, and even more so to the future development of human civilization.

We are waiting in pain and looking forward to hearing from you.

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Falun Dafa Practitioners from Mainland China

January 6, 2001

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(Translated on January 8, 2001 from

http://minghui.cc/mh/articles/2001/1/7/6539.html)

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List of Websites

News on the Crackdown

http://www.faluninfo.net

Reports on Extensive and Severe Human Rights Violations in the Suppression of Falun Gong in the People's Republic of Chinaá

http://hrreports.faluninfo.net/

Letter to Chinese Government from Latin American Women's Congress

http://clearwisdom.net/eng/2000/Nov/19/WWS111900_1.html

(Some personal recounts of torture and abuse in Women's Labour Camps in China)

• 'THESE CHINESE WOMEN DESERVE OUR RESPECT'

The strength of female practitioners in Tongzhou District, Beijing

http://clearwisdom.net/eng/2000/Oct/14/NFL101400_2.html

• More People Must Pay Attention to the Practitioners' Situation in Shijiazhuang Women's Labour Camp (8/27/00)

http://clearwisdom.net/eng/2000/Aug/27/MNC082700_1.html

• http://www.faluninfo.net/search.asp and enter keyword 'women'