According to human rights lawyer David Matas, the Chinese regime’s treatment of Falun Gong practitioners can be considered a form of genocide. The ongoing persecution of this spiritual discipline has been described as a “cold genocide” that is more difficult to identify than mass killings that occur within a shorter time frame. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a Chinese meditation practice that includes slow-moving exercises and focuses on the principles of “Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance.” It was estimated that there were around 70 million followers before the Chinese Communist Party launched a crackdown in 1999, leading to the detention, torture, and social exclusion of practitioners. In 2019, an independent people’s tribunal chaired by British barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice found evidence suggesting that Falun Gong adherents had been killed for their organs. The International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC) explained that the large number of detainees in China allowed for a “reverse matching” system, in which prisoners who were the best organ matches for paying recipients were chosen and killed for organ extraction. Matas emphasizes that this form of genocide happens slowly over time, with several thousand deaths occurring each year. He argues that the motivation behind the killings was not monetary but strictly ideological. Despite arguments that the mass killings of Falun Gong practitioners may not be considered genocide because of a profit motive or the possibility of leaving the group to avoid being killed, Matas maintains that genocide refers to the killing of an identifiable group, regardless of individual motivations or actions. Matas made these remarks at a rally in London commemorating the 24th anniversary of the CCP’s suppression of Falun Gong.