A Qantas employee, demoted after being deported from China for practising Falun Gong, should be reinstated, a Fair Work Australia tribunal has ruled.
Sheridan Genrich, a Qantas flight attendant with the company since 2001, was removed from international flying (long haul) and restricted to lower-paying domestic routes (short haul) after being targeted by Chinese immigration police on a Qantas international flight, and then deported.
Ms Genrich was seeking reinstatement and compensation for lost wages. Commissioner Raffaelli, in presenting his judgement, said: “In my view, I consider that the Applicant can and should be able to return to long-haul flying duties.”
The judgement was posted in full on the Fair Work Australia website.
Interrogated
In the judgement, Ms Genrich describes how she was called to the front of the plane on landing at Beijing airport in 2008 and taken into a room by herself, where she was interrogated by Chinese immigration police for one and half hours.
“According to the Applicant, she was very scared, possibly the most scared she had ever been in her life. She feared that she had been spied on and that the reason that she had been led into the room was because she was a practitioner of Falun Gong,” the judgement said, later adding: “No one from Qantas came into the room.”
According to the judgement, Ms Genrich’s hand luggage was searched and her personal copy of Zhuan Falun, the book of Falun Gong teachings, was found. Her travel bag was then searched and copies of the Chinese language editions of The Epoch Times, known to be critical of the Chinese regime, were also found.
The tribunal heard that Ms Genrich was then handed a Qantas boarding pass and, while being escorted back to the Qantas plane, was told by the immigration police “never to return to China and that the next time the consequences would be more severe.”
The report notes that she was given no documentation from Chinese authorities to record the incident or the threat.
Falun Gong Not Illegal
Although never announced officially, it is widely known that Falun Gong practitioners have been prevented from practising their exercises and meditation in China since 1999. According to Manfred Nowak, the UN rapporteur for torture, Falun Gong practitioners remain the most severely persecuted group in China today.
Qantas had argued that because of that persecution, Ms Genrich had carried material that was illegal and had therefore breached the company’s rules of conduct. Further, now that she was banned from China, it would not only be difficult to schedule international flights for her to avoid China, but her employment on international flights could become an occupational health and safety risk should a Qantas jet be forced to land in China in emergency situations.
Counsel for Ms Genrich, Mr Prince, noted that there is no specific law banning Falun Gong in China, and that Qantas’s assessment of the illegality of Ms Genrich’s actions according to Chinese law was based on assumptions made from a “generic travel warning” from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Mr Prince noted that there was no evidence that Ms Genrich had broken any Chinese laws, saying: “The Applicant was not charged. The Applicant was not detained. The Applicant was not exposed to the process of criminal law.”
In terms of scheduling flights to avoid China, Mr Prince noted that exemptions have been made for other Qantas flight attendants, particularly a Taiwanese flight attendant who flew long haul, but was scheduled to countries other than China.
In terms of occupational health and safety concerns, Mr Prince argued that there was little risk. “The only evidence is that over a period of five years, only one Qantas aircraft with passengers has been diverted to China and those passengers remained on the plane, as did the crew,” the judgement noted him saying.
Commissioner’s Judgement
In delivering his judgement, Commissioner Raffaelli was critical of Qantas’s handling of the case, saying the company had failed to understand, or seek help to understand, exactly what transgressions Ms Genrich might or might not have made to bring about the reaction from Chinese authorities. Qantas had not questioned Chinese authorities, he noted, nor had they sought the opinion of China specialists.
“There was not even any evidence from senior Qantas marketing persons involved with China or even from its security group,” he said in the judgement.
The Commissioner acknowledged that the material Ms Genrich was carrying was “sensitive and displeasing to Chinese authorities”, noting that he would not interfere with the decision Qantas initially made to transfer Ms Genrich to short haul. However, he said it was “now almost two years” since the incident and recommended that she now be reinstated.
Commissioner Raffaelli also noted that Ms Genrich had sought compensation, but deferred his decision on that issue to a later date.
