"Up until now, there has not been a single case of a human trafficking organisation harvesting organs from their victims to be sold," Chou Bun Eng, the permanent vice-chair of the National Committee for Counter Trafficking, said in dismissing the allegations.

"These stories are all fabricated," Chou Bun Eng said.

She said the allegations that "some human trafficking organisations in Cambodia are committing organ harvesting" were made by a Hong Kong official and a Taiwanese journalist, which she added were "not new".

Videos of organ harvesting, widely dismissed as fake, have also been circulated online.

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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."

Source

• UCA News
• Image: Forbes

China's ambassador to the U.K., Liu Xiaoming, has denied a BBC investigation's findings, which concluded that Muslim children in the Uighur-majority region of western Xinjiang are being systematically separated from their parents.

The extensive investigation, commissioned by the BBC and led by leading German researcher Adrian Zenz, has found that more than 400 Uighur children in a single township have lost both their parents to prison or China's vast network of internment camps.

Chinese authorities have describe the camps as vocational education training centers aimed at curbing terrorism. But U.S. officials say that between 1 million and 3 million Uighurs have been arbitrarily imprisoned in "concentration camps" where detainees are indoctrinated and even tortured.

Just as China began detaining Uighur adults en masse, authorities also began rapidly rolling out construction of thousands of military-style full-time boarding schools for Uighur children, Zenz found.

This "weaponization of education and social care systems" is critical to "the region's hair-raising political re-education and transformation drive," he wrote, and seems to be a pre-emptive measure against the potential fallout of China's "war on terror" against Uighur resistance.

"Increasing degrees of intergenerational separation are very likely a deliberate strategy and crucial element in the state's systematic campaign of social re-engineering and cultural genocide in Xinjiang," Zenz wrote.

In southern Xinjiang, Chinese authorities have spent about $1.2 billion on building and upgrading kindergarten facilities, including large-scale expansions of dormitory space and extensive security measures.

In 2017 alone, the number of children enrolled in Xinjiang's kindergartens spiked by more than half a million. Muslim minority children comprised over 90 percent of that jump, per publicly available government statistics.

In these schools, Uighur and other local languages are largely banned. State directives order schools to focus on "thought education."

"Xinjiang's schools have become like the colonial boarding schools used by the United States, Canada or Australia, to assimilate native ethnic populations," Zenz concluded in his report.

"China has declared war on faith," Sam Brownback, ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, said June 21 at an event introducing the 2018 International Religious Freedom Annual Report.

"We've seen increasing Chinese government abuse of believers of nearly all faiths and from all parts of the mainland."

Brownback also excoriated reports that Chinese authorities have subjected prisoners of conscience to forcible organ harvesting, which he said "should shock everyone's conscience."

The reports came from an independent tribunal initiated by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, which confirmed long-standing allegations that China is forcefully harvesting the organs of marginalized people in prison camps, sometimes when patients are still alive.

"It is no longer a question of whether organ harvesting in China is happening. That dialogue is well and truly over," said Susie Hughes, the group's executive director.

On June 17, the tribunal reported that "forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale," making practitioners of the beleaguered Falun Gong spiritual movement one of the country's main sources of organs. China banned the Falun Gong in the 1990s and has smeared the meditative discipline as an "evil cult."

While Chinese officials announced the country would stop taking organs from executed prisoners in 2014, the tribunal concluded that the practice is still taking place.

The tribunal found that it was possible that Uighur Muslims' organs have been sold against their will to the billion-dollar transplant industry.

Citing a lack of evidence that China has dismantled the infrastructure used for its organ transplantation industry, as well as the country's inability to explain its organ sourcing, the tribunal said, the massive scale of the "concerted persecution and medical testing" of Uighurs suggests that "evidence of forced organ harvesting of this group may emerge in due course."

The tribunal determined that it was "beyond reasonable doubt" that China is committing "crimes against humanity" and urged international courts to investigate whether the crimes rose to the level of genocide.

Forced organ harvesting, the tribunal wrote, "is of unmatched wickedness even compared — on a death for death basis — with the killings by mass crimes committed in the last century."

• Aysha Khan is a Boston-based journalist reporting on American Muslims and millennial faith.

The aim is to help to deter organ trafficking and transplant tourism crimes.

The Catholic church in Australia supports voluntary, legal organ donation.

In a position statement in which a number of religious groups make their stance on organ donation clear, the Catholic church says "Many people owe their lives to organ and tissue transplants. Such new technologies are hailed by the Church as a great service to life.

"One way of nurturing a culture of life is through a willingness to donate organs and tissues with a view to offering a chance of health and even life itself to people who are sick."

While Australia already has strict laws for ensuring and regulating ethical practices in organ donation and transplants, the legislation does not cover crimes that occur outside the country's jurisdiction.

This is of concern as organs are harvested against people's will from several parts of the world, including the Philippines, India, Central America, Egypt and the Middle East.

The donors may be "kidnapped, killed and sold, especially children, for their organs," according to the UN Regional Information Centre for Western Europe.

In China, the UN says the majority of crimes occur within a controversial state-sanctioned system in which organs are sourced from prisoners.

The media suggests there have been about 10 to 20 cases of illegally harvested organs being used in Australian transplant surgery; however, some people think the number may be significantly higher.

Unfortunately there are few witnesses to this crime willing to stand up and be counted, which makes it difficult to estimate the number of Australians participating in illegal organ trafficking or transplant tourism.

Source

• The Epoch Times
• The Final Call
• ShareLife
• Image: Stop Organ Harvesting in China

Participants challenged the representatives from China to allow independent scrutiny to ensure it is no longer using organs from executed prisoners.

In return, China proposed that the World Health Organization (WHO) form a global task force to help crackdown on illicit organ trafficking.

The officials reaffirmed China's zero-tolerance policy toward the underground industry, which has been illegal since 2015.

If caught, perpetrators face severe punishment, Huang Jiefu, head of the National Human Organ Donation and Transplant Committee says.

Where it was common practice for executed prisoners' organs to be filched and transported to order, Huang said this is generally no longer the case.

However, he said during the years when executed prisoners' organs were used, networks of corrupt intertwined interests bred. These are hard to break and require the collaboration of different government bodies.

He showed two slides indicating an increased number of living and deceased donors in recent years and China's recent efforts to crack down on black market transplant activities.

Huang's colleague, Dr. Haibo Wang, said it was impossible to fully control China's transplant activity since there are 1 million medical centers and 3 million licensed doctors operating in the country.

Dr. Jacob Lavee, president of Israel's transplant society, insisted that WHO be allowed to conduct surprise inspections and interview donor relatives in China.

"As long as there is no accountability for what took place ... there can be no guarantee for ethical reform," he said.

Source

• ecns.cn
• nzherald.co.nz
• Image: Church Militant