They Are Coming! CCP Sends Again Relatives of Church of Almighty God Refugees to Korea to Stage False Demonstrations

 

The CCP harasses again the relatives of CAG refugees in Korea who live in China, luring them to travel abroad to South Korea on July 22-24 next to “search for relatives” and bring them back… to jail.

The Church of Almighty God: Persecuted At Home and Abroad

The Church of Almighty God (CAG) is the largest Chinese Christian new religious movement. Due to its rapid growth, the Church was included in the xie jiao list by the CCP in 1995 and has been heavily persecuted since. CAG members have been subjected to persecution, with frequent cases of arrests and torture. According to the recently released 2019 report of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), “in 2018, the Chinese government harassed and arrested thousands of followers of […] The Church of Almighty God. Many of those detained during the year—whom The Church of Almighty God estimates to be in the thousands—suffered torture and other abuses, in some cases resulting in deaths or unexplained disappearances while in custody.” According to the yearly Report on International Religious Freedom of the U.S. State Department for 2019, covering the year 2018, “The Church of Almighty God reported authorities arrested 11,111 of its members during the year,” against 9,000 from Falun Gong, the second most targeted group. “The Church of Almighty God, the document adds, reported authorities subjected hundreds of their members to ‘torture or forced indoctrination.’” Overall, the document said, “The Church of Almighty God reported authorities subjected 525 of its members to ‘torture or forced indoctrination’ during the year. The Church also reported members suffered miscarriages after police subjected them to ‘torture and abuse’ in detention facilities.”

Church of Almighty God’s Sister Zou Demei Is Free

Supported by a campaign by Bitter Winter and several NGOs, the former leader of the CAG in four Chinese provinces, who escaped to the US with a false passport, has finally left jail.

Sister Zou Demei is free. This is very good news for Bitter Winter and the NGOs who supported her case and, together with the Lantos Foundation and supported by the International Religious Freedom Roundtable, wrote to President Donald J. Trump asking for her release. It is also good news for her lawyer, Mr Russell Abrutyn, who spared no efforts to secure the result. In March, the Immigration Judge had granted her withholding of removal based on his conclusion that she will be persecuted in China because she belongs to The Church of Almighty God (CAG). He found, based on statements by scholars, the human rights community, and her fellow church members, that she is in fact Zou Demei, she belongs to the CAG, and China persecutes CAG members. Although asylum in the US was not granted for a number of technical reasons, Sister Zou is allowed to remain in the country. And now she has left the jail where she had been detained in Detroit for more than two years, and is a free woman.

Ms. Zou was until 2016 the regional leader of the CAG in the four provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Chongqing, and Sichuan. This made her one of the top leaders of the CAG in China, and one of the most wanted by the authorities, with a substantial bounty placed on her head. As all CAG members, she destroyed all evidence of her true identity and went under the pseudonym of Lu Yao.

In 2016, Ms. Zou was informed that she was wanted not only as a leader of a banned religious movement, which was already bad enough, but on trumped up charges of espionage, which might lead to the death penalty. She managed to escape from China with the passport of another person with her picture pasted on it and reach South Korea. Since South Korea, unlike the U.S. and Canada, has not granted asylum to any CAG refugee and it was unsafe for her to live there with a false passport, she decided to move to the U.S. She landed in Detroit on January 24, 2017, where her passport was detected as false and she was arrested.

Language problems prevented her and a few co-religionists who initially tried to help her to make her case understandable to the American authorities, and her asylum request was denied on December 4, 2017, with an order that she should be deported back to China. Her appeal was rejected on May 22, 2018. On August 13, 2018, a stay of removal was granted, based on massive evidence about her identity and role in the CAG and documents about the persecution of the CAG in China. On March 18, 2019, she received permission to remain in the US.

Although Bitter Winter believes Sister Zou should have been granted asylum, we are grateful to the American authorities who prevented her deportation back to China and allowed her to remain in the U.S. “We could not have done this without the support of Bitter Winter and of so many scholars and NGOs, commented Mr. Abrutyn. I only hope that this means that other CAG members will be able to find safety and protection in the U.S. and elsewhere.”

Source： BITTER WINTER  by Massimo Introvigne

Fake News that “The Church of Almighty God Is Anti-Family” Debunked by Italian Courts

Two Italian court decisions quote scholarly studies to reject the fake news depicting The Church of Almighty God as “against the family.”

A widespread fake news about The Church of Almighty God, a large Christian new religious movement severely persecuted in China, is that it is “against the family” and “break families.” Unfortunately, the fake news has been spread by Western media in articles available on the Internet, and mentioned in old official reports by the Canadian immigration authorities still available in the data base of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)—although no longer used in Canada, where most asylum requests of The Church of Almighty God refugees are now granted.