The Epoch Times

Nov 17, 2004

TORONTO - A group of six Falun Gong practitioners, including a Canadian citizen, filed a lawsuit in Ontario Superior Court Monday charging former Chinese President Jiang Zemin and four senior officials with torture. The plaintiffs are seeking $20 million in damages.

Three of the plaintiffs, a structural engineer, an art professor and an accountant, were released from prison after Amnesty International took up their cause and publicized their cases. Professor Kunlun Zhang, a Canadian citizen, had returned to China to care for an ill relative and was arrested for practicing Falun Gong meditation exercises in a public park, according to information released to the media.

Zhang was tortured with electric shocks and denied sleep while he underwent forced brainwashing, he said.

Falun Gong is a meditation system that was practiced publicly in China from its introduction in1992 until then-president Jiang issued a ban in 1999 that practitioners say was the start of a brutal campaign of suppression.

The New York-based Falun Dafa Information Center, which tracks the situation in China, has documented more than 1100 deaths of Falun Gong practitioners there, including 68 in the months of September and October. It says the actual number of deaths could be much higher.

Toronto attorney Kate Kempton, who specializes in human rights, aboriginal and environmental law, is representing the Falun Gong practitioners.

"This claim has almost unprecedented reach, and cuts to the core of fundamental human rights and stability of society - values of key importance to Canadians," Kempton told reporters.

Along with Jiang, senior Chinese officials Li Lanqing, Luo Gan, Liu Jing and Wang Maolin are named in the lawsuit. The plaintiffs say the four are leaders of the "6-10" office, an extra-governmental office that was established by Jiang to administer his ban on Falun Gong.

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