The Hong Kong government argued yesterday that disclosing documents about why four Taiwanese Falun Gung followers were placed on an immigration watch list and denied entry could jeopardize the territory's safety.
The four Taiwanese filed a legal challenge last September seeking an explanation of why they were barred from entering Hong Kong in February 2003 to attend a Falun Gong conference. Seventy-six other Taiwanese followers were also turned away.
The four allege that the Hong Kong government violated their religious freedom by succumbing to pressure from China, which has banned the spiritual group and labeled it an "evil cult."
Last November, judge Michael Hartmann ordered the release of immigration documents detailing why the Falun Gong followers were banned, but government lawyers told a High Court yesterday that to do so would undermine Hong Kong's security.
"It would reveal the internal working of the [immigration] department, necessary for the safety of Hong Kong," said government counsel Johnny Mok outside court.
Falun Gong practitioners protested that nondisclosure would mean an unfair trial.
"We want to know why we are on that watch list. We are not threats to national security,'' said Theresa Chu, one of the four applicants.
"None of us has a criminal record. Our only common characteristic is that we're Falun Gong members."
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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