New Orleans, USA - A hotel that booted 72 members of a spiritual group banned from China to make room for an official Chinese delegation wasn't discriminating against the religion, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal upheld a lower-court ruling that the Falun Gong members do not have a valid discrimination claim against the Homestead Studio Suites hotel in Houston, where they had reserved rooms to protest a visit in 2002 by Jiang Zemin, then president of China.
The ruling coincidentally comes less than a week after a Falun Gong member heckled China's current president, Hu Jintao, during a White House ceremony.
A month before Zemin's visit, the 72 members had booked rooms at Homestead Studio Suites, near the hotel where Zemin planned to stay in October 2002. They said the hotel later canceled their reservations, and those for other people with Asian names, at the request of a Chinese agency seeking to suppress the protest.
The 5th Circuit said the Chinese government had reserved "a substantial number of rooms to PRC members at a premium rate for the duration of Jiang's visit."
This overbooked the hotel, so Homestead canceled reservations for people who had reserved short-term stays, offering them free transportation to and a free one-night stay at a neighboring Homestead hotel, it said.
But it filled the rooms with people who "are also of Chinese national origin;" there was no evidence that non-Chinese patrons kept short-term reservations; and there was no evidence that non-Chinese patrons were offered better rooms elsewhere than the Chinese patrons, the ruling said.
Since they cannot prove racial bias, they cannot prove that the hotel and the government of China conspired to act on racial prejudice. And since Homestead's "walk policy" apparently is a standard practice in the business and because the chain offered a reasonable alternative, the Falun Gong members cannot prove "high degree of unfairness" needed to prove a discrimination suit.
They cannot prove breach of contract because they did not prove any damage from the reservation change, the court said.