Russia bans lawyer David Matas

INTERNATIONAL human rights lawyer David Matas is banned from Russia, along with his report on the harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners' organs, according to Winnipeg Free Press on January 3, 2012.

The report by Winnipeg's Matas, a 2010 Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and former Edmonton MP David Kilgour was labelled extremist literature and banned in Russia.

Matas said he didn't know about the ban until he was the keynote speaker at a 2011 conference on Internet hate speech in Kyiv.

"This activist who was tracking the ban on extremist literature in Russia came up to me and said ‘Did you know that what you’ve written is on the banned extremist literature list in conjunction with a number of Falun Gong members?’ "

What he co-wrote was a report that said Falun Gong practitioners were being killed for their organs for transplants.

Falun Gong is a spiritual practice banned in China.

The report was published in three versions, first in 2006 and 2007 then as the book Bloody Harvest in 2009. The first and second versions were translated into Russian and distributed in Russia.

The Pervomayskiy court in Krasnodar, Russia banned the report in August 2008.

The Russian ban was based on a court-chosen expert opinion the report "can create for the readers a negative image of China, its social and political system, representatives of authorities, medical workers, military, etc."

Last month, the ban was upheld on appeal by the Krasnodar regional court.

Matas is asking the federal government to issue a diplomatic note of protest to Russia over the banning of the report.

Matas and Kilgour can't enter Russia to present the findings of their report, he said. The 2002 Counteraction of Extremist Activities prohibits foreign nationals on the territory of the Russian Federation as representatives of the given organization.

That's put the kibosh on an invitation he received in Ukraine to speak at a conference in Russia this year.