SIR – I agree with the argument that “We must prioritise human rights in China” put forward by Malcolm Moore (August 9).

This weekend sees the third anniversary of the imprisonment in Beijing of the Christian human rights lawyer Mr Gao Zhisheng. Since then he has been tortured to the point of suicide twice and none of his external contacts know his current whereabouts.

Last week Gao was awarded the 2010 International Human Rights Lawyer Award by the American Bar Association.

His ‘crime’ was exposing the arbitrary, brutal and paranoid nature of China’s regime, in which millions are in detention without trial or undergoing ‘re-education through labour’.

Christianity has been singled out by Beijing for repression for several years: but it was the murderous process in which the millions of blameless but popular Buddha-school Falun Gong, who have been brutally and systematically repressed in what amounts to genocide since 1999, which was examined and reported on by Gao Zhisheng.

Boris Johnson’s reference on the same page to the ongoing trial of the genocidal Liberian ex-president Charles Taylor in his article “The holy impulse that can lead to a dinner with a despot” allows me to hope that the EU’s Democracy Instrument which I founded after the fall of the Berlin Wall – and which funds the trials of people like Taylor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague – may one day see the worst tyranny in human history brought to court: that in Beijing since 1949.

Edward McMillan-Scott

MEP (Yorkshire & Humber, Liberal Democrat)
European Parliament Vice-President for Human Rights and Democracy
Brussels