(Minghui.org) An exiled Falun Dafa practitioner filed a lawsuit against former Chinese Communist Party head Jiang Zemin for launching the persecution against her spiritual belief, which led to her being imprisoned for nine years and being severely tortured.
Ms. Shi Zhenhua, 65, mailed the filing from her home in Los Angeles to China's Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Supreme People's Court on June 16. Both the Procuratorate and court have accepted her filing.
Ms. Shi previously worked at a food store in Tianjin City, China. She started practicing Falun Dafa in 1998. When Jiang Zemin ordered the ban of Falun Dafa in July 1999, police ransacked her home and detained her, demanding that she write a promise to stop practicing Falun Dafa.
She was arrested in February 2001, and interrogated and tortured in Tianjin's Donglou Police Station. She was handcuffed to a steel bed frame and secured with heavy chains for five days. The police frequently slapped her face, cursed at her, and limited her use of the restroom, in attempts to force her to give up her belief.
She was sentenced to nine years in prison in February 2002. In the Tianjin Women's Prison, she was forced to do manual labor during the day, then often made to stand without moving in one place until late at night. The torture and abuse destroyed her health; her urine often contained blood.
Because she refused to give up Falun Dafa, the guards did not allow her to have regular meals. She consequently developed severe anemia and passed out several times.
In 2007, the prison hospital diagnosed that she had only six grams of hemoglobin—14 grams is normal for a woman—and cardiac ischemia, which is lack of blood flow and oxygen to the heart muscle. The hospital refused to accept her, not wanting to take responsibility in case she died.
Guards then took her to the People's Hospital, but that hospital also refused to accept her after giving her a blood test. Rather than release her on medical parole, however, guards kept her in prison.
She was released in February 2010. Once home, the harassment continued. Staff from the 610 Office frequently came. The chief of the police station led a dozen people to come to her home and demand that she write a promise not to practice Falun Dafa. She was followed when she went shopping and her phone conversations were monitored.
Ms. Shi and her husband finally had no choice but to sell their property and come to the U.S. on May 1, 2011.
In 1999, Jiang Zemin, as head of the Chinese Communist Party, overrode other Politburo standing committee members and launched the violent suppression of Falun Gong.
The persecution has led to the deaths of many Falun Gong practitioners in the past 16 years. More have been tortured for their belief and even killed for their organs. Jiang Zemin is directly responsible for the inception and continuation of the brutal persecution.
Under his personal direction, the Chinese Communist Party established an extralegal security organ, the “610 Office,” on June 10, 1999. The organization overrides police forces and the judicial system in carrying out Jiang's directive regarding Falun Gong: to ruin their reputations, cut off their financial resources, and destroy them physically.
Chinese law allows for citizens to be plaintiffs in criminal cases, and many practitioners are now exercising that right to file criminal complaints against the former dictator.