A Washington-based law foundation has called for those suspected of being involved in abusive transplant practices in China’s organ harvesting to be held accountable.
Led by a group of high-profile lawyers, the China-focused Human Rights Law Foundation (HRLW) released a statement outlining why action against Chinese officials is required by first explaining what has occurred in China’s organ harvesting.
Subscribe to our Newsletter!
Receive selected content straight into your inbox.
“Since the year 2000, the People’s Republic of China has engaged in state-led efforts to industrialize its system of organ procurement and transplantation,” said the statement released on February 10.
HRLW went on to describe the scope of such medical industrialization.
“This has involved a variety of intensive efforts to modernize its transplantation system, provide clinical training to doctors and nurses, develop a domestic immunosuppressant industry, and engage in basic science and research and development on organ transplantation,
“This coincided with a vast expansion in the number of transplant operations performed.”
The statement pointed out why this is alarmingly problematic.
“All of these efforts were undertaken during a period in which China had almost no voluntary donors, and a scarce number of living related donors. Thus, the only source of organs during the period was prisoners,” the statement said.
“In 2005 and 2006 — after years of denials — Chinese officials claimed that executed death row prisoners were the primary supply of donors for the vast number of transplants that had taken place.”
China’s organ harvesting not from executed criminals
HRLW explained why executed criminal prisoners could not have been the source of transplant organs for China’s organ harvesting.
“Yet during the same period — the year 2000 to the present day — the number of criminal prisoners sentenced to death in China has been in steady decline. Meanwhile, the number of prisoners of conscience in custody, including practitioners of the persecuted spiritual discipline Falun Gong, as well as Uyghur Muslims, grew rapidly,” the statement said.
“There is a significant body of evidence indicating that these prisoners became the mainstay of donor bodies fueling China’s rapid development of organ transplantation in China.”
See former-Canadian MP David Kilgour talk about the forms of evidence about organ harvesting in China in this video published by End Organ Pillaging:
Such evidence was presented in the report Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update published in 2016, which said an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 transplants are performed each year in China. The main target for organ harvesting, the report said, is Chinese who adhere to the meditation practice of Falun Gong. To a lesser extent, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and select House Christians have also been killed in order to obtain organs for transplants in China’s organ harvesting, the report said.
“Such evidence includes recorded telephone admissions from Chinese doctors, blood tests of political prisoners in custody, threats and admissions from prison guards alluding to this practice, involvement of transplant surgeons in anti-Falun Gong work, and involvement of anti-Falun Gong security officials in organ transplantation work,” said HRLW.
“Extrajudicial killing is a crime against humanity, a violation of customary international law, and an abrogation of China’s own constitution and criminal statutes,” said the statement.
“But live organ harvesting, killing innocent people for their body parts, was like something I could never have… https://t.co/rtyewb5vnM
— OrganHarvestingTruth (@OrganHarvesting) February 15, 2018
“The Human Rights Law Foundation calls for perpetrators of this crime — the extrajudicial killing of innocent Chinese citizens for the purposes of organ procurement — to be subject to international criminal and civil sanctions, and is engaged in efforts to document the activities of human rights violators and assist in global efforts to bring them to justice.”
Among litigation cases that HRLW have been involved in are those against Cisco Systems for building the censorship system “Golden Shield” for China’s ruling communist government and for filing a successful case in Spain against past Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin and other top party officials involved in the persecution of Falun Gong.
See this China Uncensored episode for more information related to organ harvesting in China:
