Harper should stand against Chinese slave labour

Kilgour and Matas: Most of the population of Chinese slave labour camps are practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that the Communist Party banned in 1999 out of fear that the ideological supremacy of the Party was threatened by its popularity. The U.S. State Department has concluded that “Falun Gong adherents constituted at least half of the 250,000 officially recorded inmates in [China’s] re-education‑through‑labour camps.” (Unofficial estimates suggest that there are actually 1,200 forced labour camps, with 2 million inmates.)

We concluded, in two reports in 2006 and 2007 and a book published in 2009 under the title Bloody Harvest, that Falun Gong practitioners have been killed in the tens of thousands, and their organs sold for transplants. Chinese arbitrary detention facilities are not just forced labour camps, in other words: They also are vast forced organ-donor banks.

Goods imported into Canada should withstand scrutiny on both economic and ethical terms. A trade mission to a communist state exporting the products of slave labour around the world at rock bottom prices should do more than seek favourable terms of trade for Canada. Its leaders, including the Prime Minister himself, should do what they can to end the abhorrent practice of slave labour in China.

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