Open Letter Urges Attorney General To Label Chinese Communist Party as a Transnational Criminal Organization
CCP Violations Far Exceed ‘Criminal Activity’ Threshold,
say Save the Persecuted Christians, Other Human Rights Watchdogs
WASHINGTON — A broad coalition of human rights advocates on Thursday delivered an open letter to Attorney General William Barr asking him to officially condemn the Chinese Communist Party as a criminal outfit responsible for violating human rights, committing injustices around the globe, and causing millions of deaths worldwide.
Save the Persecuted Christians (STPC), a leading international human rights advocacy group, sent the letter and petition requesting that Barr designate the CCP a “transnational criminal organization,” which the FBI defines as posing “a significant and growing threat to national and international security with dire implications for public safety, public health, democratic institutions, and economic stability across the globe.”
“For far too long, the world blindly ignored the menacing criminality of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Liz Yore, esq., founder of YoreChildren and a partner of Save the Persecuted Christians who authored the letter. “The Trump Administration is rightly taking a tough stance against the unrelenting corruption and repression of the CCP. It is time that we speak the truth and call out the CCP in all its brutality. The CCP is a transnational criminal organization, and the Trump Administration needs to designate it as such, so that the full prosecutorial power of the federal government can outlaw these global gangsters. As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promised, ‘we won’t stay still while Communist China tries to crush the world’s freedoms.’”
STPC, together with the Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC), argues the Chinese Communist Party deserves this label due to its verified illegal activity and desecration of human rights.
“It is exceedingly evident that the list of transnational criminal organizations should include the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” the letter states. “The pattern of the CCP criminality in the U.S. and around the world demonstrates a clear and present threat ‘to public safety and national security.’”
The CCP’s criminal activity reaches far beyond China’s borders, where victims and international organizations have long been reported. Having practiced human rights abuses against its own people for 70 years, the communist organization now threatens Americans, according to STPC and other signers of the letter.
“The CCP’s lethality and criminal sophistication demonstrates that this lawless CCP poses a clear and present danger to the health, security and prosperity of America,” the letter states.
Examples of the CCP’s criminal actions that harm American citizens include distributing lethal synthetic drugs, which kill more than 31,000 a year, proliferating economic espionage, and deliberately concealing the severity of the coronavirus, which has now caused more than 129,000 American deaths.
International human rights watchdogs decry the ever increasing persecution of people of faith under the Communist regime, where churches have been blown down, faith communities attacked, and church leaders incarcerated or disappeared. Members of the Falun Gong have for decades been subjected to criminal organ harvesting. And between 1 and 3 million ethnic Uyghurs are kept in modern-day concentration camps as slave laborers subjected to torture, forced abortion and sterilization.
Designating the CCP a transnational criminal organization would qualify the crime outfit for legal, economic, and diplomatic penalties. STPC argues this is the least the United States can do after standing by silently for so long. With more than 100 signatures on the petition, many Americans agree.
“The global reach and level of lethal organized criminal activity by the CCP is astonishing and demands its immediate designation and prosecution as a transnational criminal organization,” the letter states. “Nothing less leaves Americans vulnerable to a widespread campaign of lawlessness, intimidation, and piracy by the CCP which imperils our way of life.”
In addition to YoreChildren, STPC, and the CPDC, signers include Global Alliance Against Communist Disinformation and Propaganda, Montagnard Stand For Justice, Christian Activist Network of New England, Mission America, Bitter Winter, Committee for Religious Freedom in Vietnam, Boat People SOS – Religious Freedom Project, Revealing Light Ministries, and Citizen Power Initiatives for China, and the Jubilee Campaign, among nearly 600 other individuals and organizations.
The mission of Save the Persecuted Christians is to save lives and save souls by disseminating actionable information about the magnitude of the persecution taking place globally and by mobilizing concerned Americans for the purpose of disincentivizing further attacks on those who follow Jesus.
With so much of the world’s Christian population being imprisoned and/or harassed for their beliefs, including Christians in China, the need has never been greater for the sort of grassroots campaign STPC’s SaveUs Movement is working to foster. Its efforts are modeled after a miraculously successful one that helped free another population suffering from heavy persecution—Soviet Jews—by penalizing those in the Kremlin responsible for such repression. Through this movement, Save the Persecuted Christians endeavors to provide American policymakers with the popular support they need to effect real change worldwide and alleviate systemically the suffering being experienced by so many of those following Christ.