Archival Rescue 66 ~ Chen Defection

Refugee recounts torture scene, Bob Brown helps dissident in hiding from Australian and Chinese officials, another asylum seeker speaks out;

Third Chinese man backs countrymen's claims
June 10, 2005 - 12:20AM Sydney Morning Herald

A Chinese refugee in Australia, who says he saw a dissident tortured to death, can confirm the claims by two of his countrymen that China persecutes its citizens and spies on them, his lawyer says.

Bernard Collaery, a prominent lawyer in Canberra, has detailed the story of an unnamed man who fled to Australia after questioning the torture of dissidents by Chinese security forces.

The last straw for the man was when he saw a Falun Gong practitioner tortured to death in his local police station.

"He hears the beating in his police station. He intervenes. He's told to go away. He goes upstairs to his office," Mr Collaery told the ABC Lateline program.

"His conscience stricken, he comes back downstairs and says: 'This must stop'.

"And then sees this naked man with his head in a chair, his legs poking out, clearly deceased, and he's horrified by it. That's the last straw."


Mr Collaery says the man was a senior officer in China's security service, but is unlikely to go public with his story because he fears for the safety of relatives back in China.

"He ... is a relatively senior, diligent, honest, serving state security official.

"He took considerable exception to the widespread torture of practitioners within his police district by this insidious gestapo apparatus that has been grafted onto the state security process in and throughout China."

Mr Collaery said he has verified the man's story by identifying the dead man and his wife.

"This has been done very carefully over the last times."

Mr Collaery said when the man had gone into hiding, his home in Australia was ransacked and some documents he brought to Australia had disappeared.

He has since been granted a protection visa, Mr Collaery said.

Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown has been helping Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin, who last weekend went public with claims China had a spy network operating in Australia.

Senator Brown said China's human rights abuses were well known and around 2000 Falun Gong practitioners were dying in its prisons.
Mr Chen should also be granted protection, he said.

"We must wonder how many other people who want to break from (China's) onerous system are deterred from doing that because of the concern that they won't be given asylum, as Mr Chen should have been given by the government when he asked for it two weeks ago," he told the Lateline program.

Mr Chen is in hiding after abandoning his post at the Chinese consulate-general in Sydney on May 26.

A second defector has backed Mr Chen's claims Beijing has a sophisticated spy network operating in Australia.

Also on Lateline, Falun Gong practitioner and Australian citizen Philip Law spoke about his arrest in China three years ago.

Originally from China, Mr Law, who has been an Australian citizen for 22 years, said he was arrested while visiting Beijing in February 2002 and held for three days.

He said he was seized on the street by plain-clothes security officers and asked to spy on his fellow Falun Gong practitioners in Australia.

"There were around about 15 plain-clothes, obviously police or national security office, they rush from all directions and caught me," he told the program.

"They asked me to spy for them. They asked me to, `once you go back to Australia, collect all the information we want and send back to us'."

AAP