During a recent human rights record peer review session, Canada’s United Nations representative strongly criticized China for its persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and various other human rights abuses. Leslie Norton, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, made several recommendations regarding human rights in China, including a call for the communist regime to put an end to enforced disappearances and persecution of human rights defenders, ethnic minorities, and Falun Gong practitioners.
Norton’s comments were made on Jan. 23 during the China review session at the U.N. Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The UPR is a mechanism of the Human Rights Council, mandating each U.N. member state to undergo a peer review of its human rights records roughly every four years.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice rooted in Buddhist traditions. Practitioners have been consistently targeted by brutal persecution initiated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This includes tactics such as torture, sexual abuse, and the widely condemned practice of forced organ harvesting, as outlined in a report by the Falun Dafa Association of Canada.
The report also documents numerous instances in Canada where individuals or entities engaged in physical and verbal assault, intimidation, harassment, and social exclusion of Falun Gong practitioners. Norton also raised concerns about Beijing’s “increasing extraterritorial repression” of human rights defenders during the U.N. peer review.
The CCP’s practice of forced organ harvesting gained public attention through a study conducted by Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas and former Canadian Secretary of State and human rights activist David Kilgour. Their investigation concluded that the source of 41,500 transplants in China from 2000 to 2005 could not be accounted for, and suggested that the only explanation for the sourcing was the targeting of Falun Gong practitioners.
At a U.N. conference in Geneva, Mr. Matas highlighted growing international recognition and criticisms of the CCP’s organ harvesting. This includes a joint statement from U.N. human rights experts in June 2021, expressing alarm over reports of “organ harvesting” targeting both ethnic and religious minorities such as Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Christians detained in China.
Mr. Matas also pointed out a joint letter from 107 experts and organizations issued before the 2024 UPR, which described the CCP’s continuous persecution of Falun Gong practitioners as a “Cold Genocide.” The experts urged all U.N. member states to scrutinize China’s human rights record during the peer review session and called for the establishment of a special rapporteur on forced organ harvesting of living prisoners of conscience in China and an International Criminal Tribunal for Forced Organ Harvesting in China.
The letter emphasized that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights underscores the inviolability of human life and the security of the individual, calling these principles fundamental rights that every citizen of the world inherently deserves.