NEW YORK—A lawyer representing Falun Gong adherents filed an appeal Monday against China's main television network, CCTV, charging the station with aiding and inciting torture and genocide.
"China Central Television [CCTV] has created a network of lies about Falun Gong that encourage and incite the public, the police and other security forces in China to subject practitioners to unlawful arrests, illegal police interrogation and torture," said Terri Marsh, the plaintiff's lawyer and Executive Director of the Human Rights Law Foundation. "In many cases, [this] has resulted in the extra-judicial killing of practitioners who do not renounce their belief in the tenets of Falun Gong."
The lawsuit was initially filed in January 2006 under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act on behalf of Falun Gong adherents currently residing in the United States after having been imprisoned and tortured in China because of their spiritual beliefs.
The evidence presented in the case argues that anti-Falun Gong propaganda programs produced by CCTV have played a central role in dehumanizing adherents through deliberate misinformation, and have incited police and other security guards to subject the religious group to a campaign of persecution that relies especially on prolonged sessions of intense torture.
"The tactics deployed in these media reports and TV shows are [also] identical to those used in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, in Rwanda, during the genocide of the Tutsi by the Hutu, and in Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milosevic," says Marsh "In all of these violent assaults and massacres, the propaganda operates as the mechanism without which the mass killing and violent assaults could not occur."
According to the plaintiffs, CCTV's programming was frequently used in labor camps as part of a painful regimen of thought control aimed at forcing Falun Gong adherents to renounce their beliefs. Upon coming to the United States and seeing those same programs broadcast on CCTV's affiliate channels here, they claim to have experienced additional mental suffering.
"After being exposed to the brainwashing and torture process in China, the [CCTV's] orchestrated tour through the U.S. … its widely televised and advertised promotion no less than performance—has functioned as a triggering event and caused a reoccurrence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms for those exposed to the ... technique in China," says the testimony of Dr. Vivianna Galli, quoted in the appeal.
Monday's appeal was filed at the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, after the case was dismissed by a lower court in August 2007 on the basis that as a state-run media outlet, CCTV was entitled to immunity.
In the appeal, the plaintiffs are asking the Second Circuit to vacate the lower court's decision based on new evidence that CCTV has been privatized and therefore, is not entitled to the same immunity as the Chinese state itself.
It also argues that even if the station were still fully owned by the state, the commercial nature of the programming—including advertisements shown in between segments—renders it liable to suit based on the commercial activities exception of the state immunity act.
Since the filing of the case, CCTV has not appeared in court to defend its position or otherwise replied to the charges.