STOCKHOLM, Sweden—The Swedish Falun Gong association filed a criminal complaint against China's Minister of Commerce Bo Xilai, during his visit on September 15. The minister was scheduled to meet the King of Sweden and his Swedish counterpart Thomas Ostros on the same day.
"We want the Swedish polis to bring him in for interrogation immediately," said Vasilios Zoupounidis, representing Falun Gong, after he had filed the complaint at the Norrmalm Police Station.
The complaint accuses the Chinese minister of murder, torture and abduction of Falun Gong practitioners during his time as Mayor of Dalian and governor of Liaoning Province from 1999 to 2004.
According to Falun Gong sources, over 375 practitioners were killed in Liaoning during Bo's time in office. The province is also home to Masanjia, one of China's most notorious women's labor camps, once called "a living hell on earth," by Illinois State Senator John Cullerton.
The Swedish lawsuit joins a series of complaints against Bo filed in Australia, Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom and most recently, Finland. It was immediately forwarded to chief prosecutor Thomas Häggström at the International Prosecutors Office in Stockholm.
"I have spoken to the prosecutor. He said that he is considering the issue of immunity at the moment," said Zoupounidis.
Meanwhile, Swedish Foreign Minster Jan Eliasson said he supports other ways of bringing change to China.
"I have instructed our representatives to stand for our perception on these [human rights] issues," Elliasson told The Epoch Times a day before Bo's visit, saying that he is not in favor of isolating China because it is not "good foreign policy."
The complaint was filed under Swedish national laws and the United Nation Convention against torture. According to Peter Berquist—a Swedish lawyer who joined attempts to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Sweden in 1998—the Swedish Penalty Code allows courts to rule on crimes that carry a minimum four year penalty. This is regardless of the country where the crime was committed, the offender's nationality, or the victim's nationality.
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