LONDON (EFGIC) Citizens of the U.S., U.K., Denmark and France were among at least 11 arrested in Paris this past Saturday for wearing clothing with the words Falun Gong on it. These arrests appear to have been an attempt to keep the presence of Falun Gong invisible from the many Chinese groups that took part in a Chinese New Years Day parade.

In Trafalgar Square, Chinese people who understood the truth about Falun Gong and the persecution expressed that they opposed the persecution of Falun Gong instigated by the Jiang regime. Many people asked for truth-clarifying materials. Some western people specially asked for Chinese materials and told those who were distributing the materials that they were for their Chinese teachers. Some people said that they wanted to download the information from the Internet many times but failed and they were really happy to get it from practitioners.

On the evening of January the 23rd, clear calls of "Happy New Year, Master!" and "Falun Dafa is good!" were heard in front of the glittering Eiffel Tower. Piercing through the cloudy, cold evening Paris sky, these calls seemed to echo across the colossal firmament, breaking through layers of cosmic barriers. They represented the heartfelt wishes of Dafa disciples from various European countries and Taiwan.

'This weekend local Paris police, under intense pressure from the Chinese government, initiated a new trend in Parisian fashion with an unusual directive- “Yellow is illegal.” Or to be more specific, yellow worn by Falun Gong practitioners is illegal. The thinly veiled attempt by Chinese officials to target Falun Gong practitioners from around the world, in town to mark the Chinese New Year, was swiftly enforced by Paris police. A group of practitioners on their way to a New Year’s celebration were detained for wearing yellow clothing on the city streets.'

On January the 26th, the Stockholm International Forum held a workshop on “Preventing Genocide: Threat and Responsibility". The Prime Minister of Sweden invited representatives from sixty countries to attend and discuss the important issues related to genocide, including humanitarianism, various policies, and the question of morality.

"I was saddened to learn that you yielded to pressure for the dictators of China and stopped the French Falun Gong practitioners from participating in the Chinese New Year parade in Paris. France should have stayed true to European democratic and egalitarian principles by standing up to the pressure from China. China suppresses its own people and now France is allowing China to suppress the citizens of France from expressing their beliefs!"

Dafa Practitioner Li Jun was sentenced to seven years imprisonment solely for producing information revealing the true situation of the persecution of Falun Dafa. He felt he had a responsibility to raise the awareness of the Chinese people, to show how they have been duped and lied to by the vicious state propaganda. For this act of courage he lost his life.

At the Dalian Labour Camp in Liaoning Province, Falun Gong practitioners are brutally tortured. However, because information from inside is tightly blocked, outsiders barely know anything about the true situation.The police force practitioners to do hard labour twelve to sixteen hours a day and forbid them from talking to each other. Police direct inmates to persecute those very determined practitioners. If they refuse to be "brainwashed," then they are forced to stand for extended periods of time without moving. Some were forced to stand for six days straight.

Ms Chen Xiaojuan, is a 39 year old Falun Dafa practitioner from Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province. In January 2001, she was illegally sentenced to three years of imprisonment for distributing truth-clarifying materials.Because she was on hunger strike for more than 40 days, she was sent to Jiangxi Changzhen prison hospital, where she was brutally force fed, causing her to vomit a large amount of blood. The hospital says she is in critical condition, but the prison police made a public statement, "Chen Xiaojuan has not been 'transformed,' so we will not release her.

Many people in Wuhan City's Central China Normal University practise Falun Gong and have been persecuted very severely since July 20, 1999. Dafa practitioner Wang Haoyun was tortured to death in the school of arts and sciences filing room. So far we have information concerning four people who were sentenced to forced labour camps. Fourteen other practitioners were thrown into detention centres, and about 23 more were forced into brainwashing centres.

I started learning to drive over a year ago. At first I thought it would be very easy. But it was no simple matter and it took me one year to get a driving license. At the same time, the process of my cultivation went completely beyond my expectations. I failed the first test after five minutes because I did not see a traffic sign. Later, it came to mind that the result of the test just reflected one of my problems when doing Dafa work. That is, I had the tendency to regard Dafa work as some ordinary work and tried to finish it in a hurry.

On January 26, 2004, Professor Jordan Paust of University of Houston Law Centre filed Brief of Amici Curiae International Law Professor in support of plaintiffs-appellants in Plaintiffs A-F v. Jiang, with the US 7th Circuit Court in the ground-breaking lawsuit against former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin and the Falun Gong Control Office of China Communist Party. Terri Marsh, Counsel of Record for plaintiffs-appellants, filed the principal brief on Jan. 20, 2004 asking the 7th Circuit Court to reverse the decision of the U.S. District Court and allow the case to go forward.

"As Canadians we greatly value our connection with the people of France and are grateful that both our peoples are fortunate to live in just and democratic societies that cherish and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms. Therefore, we were gravely shocked and disheartened to learn of the recent arrests of our fellow practitioners in Paris. They were innocent people detained without cause, and we are particularly dismayed by one of the reasons reportedly given by police, that wearing the colour yellow is illegal in France."

The symbolic trial aimed at exposing the crimes of human rights violations against Falun Gong practitioners by Jiang and the "610 Office" and to help people grasp the essence of the evil nature and the wide range of the persecution.