An Address Given By Dr Fuk Yu Gud,
Chairman Of The Chinese Commission For
Monitoring Human Rights In The United Kingdom,
To The Golders Green Anglo-Islamic Business Forum
In The Wake Of The Beijing Olympics
Good evening Radies and Gentlemen, and Honolable Guests,
No, only joking, I studied at your Oxford University in the 60s in an era before political correctness had effected a stranglehold over your institutions. If I were to report fully on human rights abuses and civil liberties outrages in the United Kingdom we would be here all night, so I will confine myself to some of the best documented cases, and to the most outrageous. These include the abuse of police powers, the murder by the state and its agents of totally innocent persons with impunity, the framing of totally innocent persons for heinous crimes, the use of agents provocateurs including children to incite crimes, and the persecution of thought criminals, mostly indigenous white Britons who object to the colonisation of their country.
The Beijing Olympics are now over, and are generally agreed to have been a triumph for our great nation in spite of repeated attempts to blacken its name by the Tibetan separatists and others. You will doubtless all of you recall the prominent coverage that was given to the arrest and deportation of so-called pro-Tibet protesters, including from your country. There is a saying when in Rome, do what the Romans do. If you offer a guest your hospitality you do not expect to have that hospitality abused. It is the position of the Chinese Government, of the overwhelming majority of Chinese people, and of most Tibetans, that Tibet is and will remain a part of China. It is not though the position of most Iraqis that Iraq is part of or a colony of Britain or the United States, so we ask those Westerners who protest at what they refer to as the occupation of Tibet to first of all concern themselves with the occupation of Iraq, the illegal invasion of which country has left countless innocent Iraqis dead.
There was one incident at the Olympics in which a BBC reporter was arrested. He was detained briefly because the officers on the ground did not realise he was an accredited journalist but believed he was covering a protest for propaganda purposes. As soon as the Chinese authorities realised the mistake, the reporter was freed and our apologies were offered. The behaviour of the Chinese police contrasts markedly with that of the British police.
In May of last year, an accredited photographer named Andy Handley was arrested and handcuffed by a police sergeant after refusing to give him the memory card from his camera which contained photographs of a road accident he had taken in a public place. The police told him they wanted to seize it as evidence of a crime scene. Handley was backed by the journalists’ union, so the police ended up with egg on their faces, but not every innocent person can call on a trade union or big organisation to fight his corner.
There have been dozens or perhaps hundreds of similar instances where the British police act in such a manner, but perhaps the most outrageous, ironically, occurred at the time of the Beijing Olympics. A member of the public in Bristol took photographs of a police van reversing the wrong way up a one way street. He was first told to “fluck off” – if you will pardon my Flench – then attacked, beaten to the ground, arrested, and charged with assault.
In China, police do not assault members of the public and then bring assault charges against them. Police on duty do not arrest citizens who take photographs of them breaking the law, because police in China do not break the law, they enforce the law.
The two photographers mentioned here though were lucky because at least they escaped with their lives. There have been many cases in which innocent members of the British public have actually been murdered by the police; the most high profile such case in recent years has been that of Jean Charles de Menezes who was shot repeatedly in the head by undercover officers in Stockwell, London.
While there were very special circumstances relating to this tragedy, it is without doubt that the death of this totally innocent man – a foreigner and a guest in your country – was the result of gross incompetence by the police. The fact that he was genuinely mistaken for a terrorist, a suicide bomber who may have blown up himself and dozens of innocent people at any moment in no way mitigates for his slaying. In China, the police do not make such mistakes, and when officials, police or other do cause injury or death to innocent persons, they are held personally accountable, and pay the price. But what happened here? The government lawyers covered up for their friends in the police by making this a health and safety issue. Instead of prosecuting individual police officers, they prosecuted the Metropolitan Police.
What was the result? The Metropolitan Police is a public body, and a public body cannot be given meaningful punishment. You cannot say the Metropolitan Police Service will go to gaol. All that can happen is that the police service can be fined. And who pays the fine? The public, of course. The tragic death of this innocent man and the entire resulting prosecution was turned into a money making exercise for the lawyers and for the police at the expense of the public. No police were suspended, none lost pay, and indeed many were granted a holiday in effect because instead of patrolling the streets or whatever they would have been doing they were sitting outside a court room waiting to be called as witnesses, and paid for out of the public purse. Even the compensation that was paid to the victim’s family did not come out of the pockets of police officers or the police union, but from the government, in other words the British public, because the government has no money of its own.
Although the de Menezes case was scandalous, there have been many other cases where police have literally murdered innocent members of the British public with total impunity and with malice aforethought, and without the pretext of “We thought he was a terrorist”. The names Harry Stanley and James Ashley deserve honourable mention. Mr Stanley was carrying a table leg in a bag, which idiot police took to be a shot gun, and shot him down in a hail of bullets without warning.
James Ashley was murdered in his own home, naked. He had been in bed with his girlfriend in the small hours when his apartment was raided, and an armed officer, Christopher Sherwood, shot him dead. Ashley had been suspected of dealing in small quantities of drugs, which is not a capital offence in Britain. It remains to be seen why the police had to raid his premises in the dead of night. A possibly armed suspect can most often be arrested without incident or difficulty in a public place, on the street outside his home, when he is unsuspecting and has no time to react.
Uncharacteristically, James Ashley’s killer was charged with his murder, but the trial judge had obviously been given special instructions because she stopped the half-hearted prosecution halfway through the trial. Harry Stanley was not even afforded that honour; the government lawyers who investigated – quote unquote – his murder – found there was, in their stock phrase, no realistic prospect of a conviction. In China, innocent members of the public are not executed by police. Only those convicted of capital offences are so executed, and then only after due process of law.
There have been countless cases of police framing of innocent persons in the United Kingdom over the years. The way most persons were framed was by manufactured confessions, a process known as verballing. This was most often used against criminals and former criminals; police officers would put words into their mouths usually of the variety of “It’s a fair cop, guv”. Numerous innocent persons were gaoled on account of these manufactured confessions, until your Parliament with uncharacteristic wisdom brought in the tape recording of police questionings of suspects. As a result of that, verballing disappeared literally overnight.
There are still people who are convicted on the basis of unsubstantiated confessions though, cell confessions. Now that the British Government has realised that police officers cannot be trusted, the courts are relying on remand prisoners and convicted criminals, who of course can be trusted. The most notorious such case in recent years is that of Michael Stone, who has now been incarcerated for over a decade on the basis of one ludicrous cell confession. No one in China would ever be convicted of a heinous double murder on such ludicrous evidence.
In China, not only do the police not break the law, but they do not conspire to incite others to break the law. In Britain it is a regular occurrence for police and trading standards officers to exploit under-age persons, children if you will, to incite otherwise law abiding persons to break the law. Children who could pass for young adults are sent into newsagents and off licences to tempt the shopkeeper to sell them tobacco or alcohol. If the shopkeeper does unwittingly sell to an underage person, he can be dragged into court and fined, and may even lose his livelihood. Though the shopkeeper may be unwitting, the officials who incite him to sell to the young are not unwitting; in China this would never happen. There is rule of law, and one law for all.
I come now to the most outrageous human rights and civil liberties abuses rampant in Britain, those of the persecution of thought criminals by the state, usually on the pretext of fighting the non-existent disease of racism.
Britain is home to many thousands of ethnic Chinese, most of whom work in Chinese businesses, live in Chinatowns, and are good citizens while minding their own. Chinese realise this is what is expected of them, and they expect nothing more and nothing less of foreigners who visit or live in China. Chinese do not allow large numbers of unassimilable aliens to enter their country and to demand special privileges or special laws, or to intermarry with Chinese. As long as foreigners and immigrants show deference to Chinese culture and ways, they are welcome in our country.
Not everyone is as tolerant as Chinese however, some people draw cartoons which some may find offensive. At the same time as the Beijing Olympics, the case of the Heretical Two came to the fore in Britain; these were two men, Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle, whose crimes were to publish cartoons on an American website.
While hypocrites in Britain attack China for its supposed suppression of dissent, that country is quietly prosecuting and sending men to gaol for making childish drawings. In 1996, the Metropolitan Police actually issued a warrant for the seizure of a cartoon, a character named Titty Fart. Apparently this cartoon had offended Jewish Holocaust survivors, who claim six million dead. Some people challenge that figure, and it is actually a criminal offence to do so in Germany. As a loyal Chinese citizen I ask, what is so special about six million dead? Under Chairman Mao, fifty million perhaps seventy-five million or more of my countrymen and women perished needlessly. Chinese do not scream for cartoonists to be imprisoned for poking fun of war victims, or for haggling over how many of us were murdered during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.
Britain also has most repressive laws against free speech any time race is mentioned. Here is great irony; years ago nationalists and racists were dragged into court even for mentioning black crimes such as mugging. Now, blacks themselves are screaming that their sons are being stabbed and shot to death on street by other blacks. As well as racists, Moslems are also subjected to persecution and harassment because of the terror connection with Bin Laden and so-called Islamic Jihad. If British establishment, lawyers and police had spent less time harassing racists and harmless Moslems they would have had more resources to combat real menaces to British society, and perhaps have stopped 7/7. But these people never learn anything the same as they never forget anything.
As with police brutality and corruption, it would be tiresome to itemise all the malicious prosecutions and harassments that racists have been subjected to in Britain, but we can mention the leader of the British National Party, twice, the previous leader, the late John Tyndall, Colin Jordan, a geriatric Nazi whose main activity is to publish small circulation polemics and cartoons, the late Lady Birdwood, who was dragged into court twice and very nearly a third time. These are only the most prominent cases.
In closing, honourable ladies and gentlemen, I would say, Chinese Government is not perfect, Chinese people are not perfect, but we try, and will try harder. And next time you read about the persecution of dissidents in China and the suppression of free speech in my country, I ask you to turn to your own leaders, your own police, your own press, your own persecutors, and tell them to remove the planks from their eyes before they attempt to remove the moats from ours.
Thank you very much, and I look forward to seeing you in 2012. You gotta go some to beat our Olympics!
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