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Forced organ harvesting is a business affecting tens of thousands of individuals of “various religions” in China.
People are being killed for their for body parts, including skin and the Western medical community is enabling the crimes by using the organs.
The facts were proclaimed by US congressman Chris Smith last Thursday during a discussion on organ harvesting at an online hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Smith, a Catholic, co-chairs the Commission and is the co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus.
The hearing was prompted by an April 4 article published in the American Journal of Transplantation.
The article asserted that China continues to execute prisoners and procures their organs – hearts, lungs and kidneys – for transplants.
The “dead donor rule,” a mainstay of medical ethics, is widely ignored.
Many “donors” are prisoners of conscience opposed to Communist Party rule, the article said.
“Nowhere is the principle of utter disregard for the dignity of the human person, and of using people as a utilitarian means to an end, more apparent than in the horrific practice of harvesting the organs of human beings, even before they meet the standard of brain death,” Smith says.
Smith, a regular critic of human rights abuses, introduced to Congress H.R. 1592, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act. It has yet to make it out of the House or Representatives.
A co-sponsor of the measure says that “for too long, (this) has been pushed under the rug by the international community”.
Citing information passed to him from members of the much-persecuted Falun Gong sect, he says Christians, Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists have fallen victim to organ harvesting criminals. Most victims are believed to be Falun Gong members.
Falun Gong is a meditative sect with practices drawn from both Buddhism and Taoism. The Chinese government banned the sect in 1999 claiming that it was a threat, although officially the government believes that all religious practices are subversive.
Witnesses at the hearing included Sir Geoffrey Nice, who formerly led a UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
He said the independent China tribunal which he chairs found “forced organ harvesting has been committed for years … on a significant scale and that Falun Gong practitioners have been one – and probably the main – source of organ supply.”
An estimated 25,000 to 50,000 prisoners in detention camps typically fall victim to organ harvesting each year, producing an output between 50,000 to 150,000 organs.
The Western medical community’s response is problematic. Abolishing all contact with the Chinese transplantation community has been suggested.
“Congress must engage with the executive branch and medical community,” says a law professor at The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law.
Smith’s proposed legislation and other measures “will not accomplish their intended purpose until Congress uses its power of the purse” to demand accountability, he says.
But there is very little incentive. “It is far easier to be wilfully blind than to ask hard questions.”
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