Serbia Condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for Banning Falun Gong Protests During Xi Jinping’s Visit

CAP Liberté de Conscience | June 2026 |

A Movement Born in China, Persecuted Since 1999

Before examining the legal ruling, a brief word on who the Falun Gong are — because their story is inseparable from the case before Strasbourg.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice rooted in Buddhist and Taoist traditions, combining meditative exercises — known as qigong — with an ethical framework built on three principles: truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. It emerged in China in 1992 and spread rapidly. By the late 1990s, the Chinese government estimated its practitioners at over 70 million people — more members than the Chinese Communist Party itself at the time. That number became a threat in the eyes of the CCP leadership. In July 1999, the Chinese government declared Falun Gong an illegal “evil cult” and launched a systematic campaign of repression. Practitioners have since faced arbitrary detention, torture, forced labour, and — according to extensive documented evidence — forced organ harvesting while alive. The movement has been driven underground in China and into exile abroad. Its members continue to practice and to bear witness to the persecution they endure.

That witness — peaceful, public, and persistent — is precisely what Serbian authorities sought to suppress in June 2016. Ten years later, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) delivered its verdict.

Three Protests Banned, a State Visit Protected

The applicant, the Serbian-Chinese Friendship Society FDH (Fond za Demokratiju i Humanost), is a Belgrade-based association whose members include Falun Gong practitioners. In June 2016, it notified the competent Serbian authorities of its intention to hold three peaceful public assemblies in Belgrade, coinciding with the official state visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping on 17 and 18 June.

The purpose of the assemblies was clear and lawful: to draw public attention to the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China. The Serbian Ministry of the Interior prohibited all three gatherings, citing the risk of public disorder. Specifically, authorities argued that the protests could provoke counter-demonstrations by supporters of the Chinese president, potentially leading to clashes and threatening public safety.

The association challenged the bans before the administrative courts and subsequently filed a constitutional appeal. The administrative proceedings concluded only after the planned assembly dates had passed. The Constitutional Court finally dismissed the appeal on 8 February 2024 — nearly seven and a half years after it had been lodged — on procedural grounds of non-exhaustion of domestic remedies. With all domestic avenues exhausted, the FDH brought the case to Strasbourg.

The Court’s Ruling: Speculative Risk Is Not Enough

On 2 June 2026, a Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights issued its judgment in Serbian-Chinese Friendship Society FDH v. Serbia (application no. 54936/20), finding unanimously that Serbia had violated Article 11 (freedom of peaceful assembly and association) and Article 13 (right to an effective remedy) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The key points of the ruling deserve to be read carefully.

On the freedom of assembly: The Court held that the prohibition of the three assemblies constituted an interference with the right to freedom of peaceful assembly that was not “necessary in a democratic society.” Serbian authorities had failed to carry out a concrete, individualised security assessment. Their justification rested on assumptions — the possibility that some individuals might counter-demonstrate, that tensions might arise — rather than on specific, evidence-based grounds. The Court was unambiguous: the mere possibility of tension, or of opposition to the message conveyed by an assembly, cannot in itself justify banning a peaceful gathering. A speculative threat does not clear the legal bar.

On the state’s positive obligations: The Court went further, reaffirming that states party to the Convention do not merely have a negative obligation to refrain from interfering with peaceful assembly. They bear a positive obligation to take measures that enable assemblies to take place safely — including providing protection to participants. A complete prohibition is a last resort, justified only in exceptional circumstances and on the basis of compelling, concrete evidence.

On the political dimension: The ruling carries particular weight because the prohibition was directly linked to a diplomatic event. The Court’s reasoning implicitly acknowledges what the facts make explicit: the bans were imposed not because the protests posed a genuine security threat, but because they would have been embarrassing to China during a high-profile state visit. YUCOM, the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights which represented the FDH association, noted in its analysis of the judgment that this was not an isolated incident but part of a decade-long pattern of restrictions on the association’s public activities — including in circumstances where no foreign official visits were taking place at all.

On effective remedies: The violation of Article 13 is equally significant. The Court found that neither the administrative court proceedings nor the constitutional appeal provided the applicant with timely judicial protection. By the time any ruling was issued, the planned assemblies had long since been impossible to hold. Ex post facto protection — a decision years after the fact — has no practical value in the context of the right to assembly. Organizers must have access to an effective judicial decision before the scheduled date.

How the International Press Covered the Judgment

The ruling attracted international attention, though with varying degrees of depth.

RFI reported the judgment on the day of delivery, noting that the FDH association had been “prevented from demonstrating its support for the Buddhist-inspired Falun Gong movement, banned in China since 1999”, and that the Court had concluded the Serbian authorities’ justification was “purely speculative” — a formulation drawn directly from the Court’s own language.

La Dernière Heure / DH.net situated the ruling in a broader diplomatic context, recalling that Xi Jinping’s June 2016 visit to Belgrade was the first by a Chinese president in over thirty years, and that China-Serbia relations have since deepened — with Xi returning to Belgrade in May 2024 and personally awarding President Vučić a Chinese “friendship medal.” The Belgian daily noted that the Falun Gong had been outlawed in China in 1999 after organising a protest outside the Communist Party’s Beijing headquarters, and had claimed up to 70 million members before that date.

Agence Presse Radio focused on the legal mechanism, highlighting that the Court had judged Serbia’s arguments as resting “essentially on suppositions” that could not justify a restriction on a fundamental right, and that Serbia had failed to demonstrate “a real, immediate and sufficiently established threat”.

Vreme, the Serbian independent weekly, underlined the domestic implications: the Court found that Serbia had violated the Convention “due to its relations with Beijing” — a politically charged reading that resonates within Serbia’s ongoing debate about its alignment between European integration and its strategic partnership with China.

The United Nations, the European Parliament, and the United States: A Converging Record

The Strasbourg judgment does not stand alone. It adds to a growing body of international concern documented over years by multiple institutions.

At the United Nations, the most direct intervention came on 14 June 2021, when ten UN Special Procedures mandate-holders — including the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, the Special Rapporteur on torture, and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention — issued a joint statement expressing alarm at “reports of alleged organ harvesting targeting minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims and Christians, in detention in China.” The experts reported credible information that detainees from religious minorities were being subjected to blood tests and organ examinations without informed consent, with results registered in a database of “living organ sources.” They called on China to allow independent international monitoring — a call that has gone unanswered. (OHCHR, 14 June 2021)

UN experts had previously raised the organ harvesting issue with the Chinese government as far back as 2006 and 2007. The government’s responses, the experts noted, consistently “lacked data such as waiting times for organ allocation, or information on the sources of organs.”

At the European Parliament, a motion for a resolution tabled in January 2024 (document B-9-2024-0067) reaffirmed the institution’s concern over the systematic persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, noting that “since 1999, the Chinese Communist Party has engaged in systematic persecution to eradicate the Falun Gong religious movement” and that “freedom of religious belief is deteriorating across the People’s Republic of China.” The resolution highlighted technology-based censorship and surveillance as central tools of repression. In May 2022, the European Parliament had already adopted a resolution on reports of continued organ harvesting in China (TA-9-2022-0200), calling for targeted sanctions and an end to transplant tourism.

In the United States, the House of Representatives approved the Falun Gong Protection Act (H.R. 4132) in 2024, championed by Representatives Scott Perry and Thomas Suozzi. The legislation provides for visa bans and asset freezes against individuals and entities found complicit in human rights abuses against Falun Gong adherents. It represents the first piece of American legislation specifically naming Falun Gong practitioners as a protected group requiring legislative intervention.

CAP LC and Falun Gong: Years of Advocacy at the International Level

For CAP Liberté de Conscience, the Serbian-Chinese Friendship Society judgment is not an abstract legal development. It speaks directly to work this organisation has conducted at the United Nations, the European Parliament, and before the OSCE for years.

In September 2023, CAP LC submitted a written statement to the 54th session of the Human Rights Council — “Forced Organ Harvesting of Living Falun Gong Practitioners in China Has to End” — documenting the practice with reference to independent investigations and calling on states to exercise their obligations under international human rights law. The statement drew on the Universal Declaration on Combating and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting, presented by five NGOs at a World Summit in 2021, a text that CAP LC helped support.

In October 2020, during the 45th session of the Human Rights Council, CAP LC presented a written statement titled “Unabated Religious Persecution and the Danger of an Escalation — A Case Study on 20 Years of Persecution of Falun Gong in People’s Republic of China.” At the 43rd session in March 2020, CAP LC co-organised a side event at the Palais des Nations in Geneva — featuring testimony from Dr. Harold King and Dr. Torsten Trey — specifically on forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China.

In January 2024, as the Human Rights Council was conducting its Universal Periodic Review of China, CAP LC co-organised a parallel conference at the Palais des Nations dedicated to the persecution of Falun Gong, in partnership with organisations from across Europe. CAP LC has also covered and amplified legislative developments, including the adoption of the US Falun Gong Protection Act, as part of its mission to track progress in the international legal and political frameworks protecting freedom of conscience.

This sustained engagement is shared with allied organisations working in complementary fields. Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH), an international medical NGO recognised for its expertise, has compiled and presented to multiple UN bodies detailed forensic and statistical evidence of forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. DAFOH was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for this work and remains one of the primary sources of technical documentation before international institutions. (dafoh.org)

Freedom of Expression: The Democratic Test

The ECtHR judgment in Serbian-Chinese Friendship Society FDH v. Serbia is, at its core, about something simple. Three people wanted to stand peacefully in a public square in Belgrade and tell the world that their fellow practitioners were being tortured, imprisoned, and killed in China. The state told them: not today, not while the Chinese president is here.

The Court in Strasbourg said that was wrong. And it said it unanimously.

The ruling confirms what democratic theory has always held: the right to assemble, the right to speak, and the right to disagree with power are not conditional privileges granted by governments when circumstances are convenient. They are fundamental rights that must be upheld precisely when exercising them is uncomfortable — when the message is unwelcome, when it strains a diplomatic relationship, when the political cost is real.

The Court was explicit on this point. The right to peaceful assembly also protects assemblies whose message may be “uncomfortable, controversial, or offensive to parts of the public.” The state’s role in a democracy is not to remove dissenting voices from the public sphere. It is to ensure those voices can be heard safely.

For CAP Liberté de Conscience, this principle requires no elaboration. Freedom of expression is not a technical legal provision. It is the foundation on which every other liberty rests. Without it, there is no accountability, no visibility for the persecuted, no path to justice. The Strasbourg Court, in this case, has done what courts exist to do: it has held a state to account for choosing diplomatic comfort over constitutional obligation.

The Serbian government now bears the responsibility of executing this judgment — and of ensuring that what happened to the FDH association in June 2016 cannot be repeated. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe will monitor implementation. CAP LC will continue to follow this case and to advocate for all those who seek only to stand in a public square and speak the truth.

Further reading:

• ECtHR judgment: Serbian-Chinese Friendship Society FDH v. Serbia, application no. 54936/20, 2 June 2026 — hudoc.echr.coe.int
• OHCHR, UN experts on organ harvesting in China, 14 June 2021 — ohchr.org
• CAP LC written statements on Falun Gong — freedomofconscience.eu
• DAFOH — dafoh.org