Persecution of Falun Gong Is in Effect Genocide: Former US Official

Excerpted from TheEpochTimes.com

In an exclusive interview, former U.S. State Department official Miles Yu said that there’s more evidence of a genocide perpetrated against Falun Gong adherents in China than the plentiful evidence of a genocide against the Uyghurs.

Both the Trump and the Biden administrations have designated the repression of Uyghurs in China as a genocide. Yu previously advised then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on strategies related to China. Now Yu is supporting the view that there is not only a Uyghur genocide taking place in China, but also one against Falun Gong.

Falun Gong is a peaceful spiritual practice based on Buddhist and Daoist principles that was popularized in China during the early 1990s. The practice’s following of 70 million to 100 million adherents by 1999 was seen as a threat by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which then instituted a policy of persecution to the point of genocide, to eradicate the practice.

Yu told The Epoch Times in an Aug. 9 email: “I am surprised that [a] genocide charge against the CCP re FLG [Falun Gong] has not become a focal point of international human rights campaigns targeting the CCP.

“When deciding [a] genocide designation, the most difficult legal barrier is to prove ‘intent’ of the perpetrator.”

According to international human rights lawyer Beth Van Schaack in her analysis of the Uyghur genocide: “The biggest challenge to establishing the commission of genocide is the mens rea (or mental state) requirement that the perpetrator(s) not only intend to commit the underlying act(s), but that the acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The intent element is the hallmark of genocide and what distinguishes it from other international crimes, such as war crimes or crimes against humanity.”

Yu believes “it would be much easier to prove this [intent] in the FLG case than the Uyghur case, because the CCP has tried harder to disguise its genocidal repression against the Uyghurs while its repression against the FLG has been more blatant.”

There is more documentary evidence of a genocide against Falun Gong than there is against the Uyghurs, Yu said. “The documentation of the CCP’s criminality re FLG is also more apparent and systemic.”

International lawyer Terri Marsh, executive director of the Human Rights Law Foundation, agrees. She told The Epoch Times in an Aug. 9 email, “The evidence does support a claim of genocide: There is a plethora of evidence documenting China’s well-coordinated plans and policies to subject Falun Gong believers to a widespread suppression campaign that features torture, rape, extrajudicial killing, and other forms of degrading and injurious treatment in regions across China.”

The Human Rights Law Foundation wrote a 2015 paper that described the CCP’s “struggle” or “douzheng” (斗争) campaign, including planning that amounts to intent constitutive of genocide to eradicate Falun Gong through extralegal methods such as imprisonment, torture, and forced organ harvesting.