09


“I fled China with three other people, and it took me six months to get to the UK through Russia. It was a tough journey. I knew Britain was a country that protects human rights, because I knew that Hong Kong had been handed over to China in a very peaceful way. That gave me a good impression of the country.


“I was a mechanic in the motor industry and I meditated with Falun Gong, of which I was a member. But we’re not supposed to do the meditation exercises, the government doesn’t allow us.


“In the beginning, the government encouraged Falun Gong because there’s a custom that people do exercises in the morning in China. But afterwards, they were afraid that Falun Gong was getting bigger and bigger because there were members of the group in every city. They thought it was getting out of control. The police came to all the places we were exercising, and they took everything away.


“I lived in a village, and I and many others went to Beijing to protest about this. Because the protests were so peaceful, and so many people were listening quietly to the speakers, the government got very worried and afraid, and after that they tried to catch all the people involved.


The UN Convention on Refugees was signed in 1951 and remains the key document in determining whether a person can be protected as a refugee


At the end of 2009, 420 people from China were being supported through the asylum process in Scotland


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