A well-known whistleblower and pro-democracy figure, he was kept for years in a two-square-meter cell and routinely tortured.
by Liu Wangmin
On April 9, 2021, human rights activist Guo Hongwei died while serving his jail sentence. His family does not believe that he died of natural causes.
Guo was born in 1963 in Siping City, Jilin Province, and worked as an employee at the Fusong Jianghe Power Plant in Jilin city. In 2003, he reported a Jilin businessman and his relative Xu Wengui, a prosecutor in Jilin, as being involved in a fraud of false hospitalization bills. His whistleblowing activities were not welcomed, and he was arrested and sentenced to five years in jail in 2005 for “embezzlement of funds,” a frequent charge against whistleblowers. He reported that he was repeatedly tortured in jail.
After he was released, he started campaigning against the use of torture in Chinese prisons, and went to Beijing with his mother Xiao Yunling to petition the Ministry of Justice and ask it to investigate and compensate him for his suffering. While in Beijing, both Guo and his mother were severely beaten by unknown thugs.
The Ghent decision, defining as illegal the practice by the Jehovah’s Witnesses to teach that current members (with the exception of cohabiting relatives) should shun or ostracize those who have been disfellowshipped or have left their organization, is the culminating point of a process that, if left unchecked, will destroy religious liberty and the very notion of freedom as we know it.
Basically, the Ghent judges affirmed the principle that the freedom of an organization to self-regulate itself as it deems fit is a lesser right when compared to the freedom of the individual within the organization. They also imply that a person should enjoy the same freedoms within the organization that s/he would enjoy in the society in general.
It is not an exaggeration to argue that this deeply subverts concepts about freedom that democratic societies have accepted for centuries.
