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Wednesday, September 19, 2012

IED's statement on Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong at United Nations Sept. session

View video here

Item 4 (General debate)

International Educational Development submitted a written statement (NGO/57) about the torture of Falun Gong practitioners in mental hospitals in China and the inappropriate placement of them in these facilities.  Of equal concern to us is the continuing evidence that the organs of many practitioners are forceably harvested.

On 12 September 2012, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs held a hearing on this matter.[1] Dr, Damon Noto of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting testified that Falun Gong practitioners are arrested, screened for blood type and other qualities and then killed on demand when there is a match from a person seeking a transplant. Representative Chris Smith, from New Jersey commented that the practice challenges the English language, because “barbaric is too calm a word.”

We are aware that the Council as a whole will not address any issue in China due to political considerations. However, we urge that States eliminate the market for organs from China and that the Special Rapporteurs on Summary Execution, the Right to Health, and the Right to Freedom from Torture to look into this matter as an issue of great urgency.

China’s illegal organ harvesting: Smith

 


Over the decades, American doctors, medical schools, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies developed skills and knowledge enabling life-giving transplants of organs including hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs and corneas. These skills and knowledge have spread around the world.
 
These skills can be abused or used to set in motion sales of organs by the poor or favoritism for the rich. Consequently, the international community has developed demanding protocols to assure that organ donations follow strict procedural and ethical guidelines, codified by the Declaration of Istanbul in 2008. One bedrock principle is that donors must give consent. Another is that condemned prisoners cannot be donors. Extending these principles, medical journals will not publish articles on transplant research if organs came from executed prisoners.

In the mid-1990s, I began holding hearings on the practice of organ harvesting of prisoners in China, and unfortunately, the controversial practice has not gone away. At a hearing for which I was co-chairman last week, two subcommittees of the House Foreign Affairs Committee heard that even though few Chinese voluntarily donate organs, China stands next behind the United States in the yearly number of organ transplants. With 600 transplant centers, it has become a destination for “transplant tourism.” Each transplant of a heart or liver can provide more than $100,000 in revenue.

What adjectives can we use to describe the prospect that Chinese doctors and hospitals are engaged in large-scale harvesting of human organs for profit? The ordinary words such as “disturbing,” “appalling” or even “shocking” are inadequate.

So far, I have referred to ordinary transplants. But there’s a graver prospect. It is that Chinese military doctors may be engaged in organ harvesting from prisoners and labor-camp detainees, especially prisoners of conscience.

China’s vice minister of health acknowledged in 2005 that almost all organs come from executed prisoners, but the number of executions in China is a “state secret.” In China, there are no firm statistics, no open waiting lists and no transparency in the granting of “consent.” From the few times Chinese doctors or health officials have discussed China’s transplant system at international meetings, the figures don’t add up. The best available outside estimates indicate that the number of transplants apparently exceeds the number of criminal executions. So then, what is the source of the additional organs?

A witness at the hearing, Ethan Gutmann, interviewed Chinese medical personnel now outside China. He learned of the removal of organs by teams of military doctors in medical vans immediately after executions. The victims, he learned, came from China’s prisons or from re-education through labor camps — far from justice and investigation. They are, of course, unable to escape and testify, and expeditious cremation destroys physical evidence.

Some Falun Gong practitioners released from labor camps report that the camp doctors gave them frequent physical examinations, with special attention to their blood type and the health of their kidneys, livers, lungs, hearts and eyes — “the retail organs.”

Many members of this spiritual movement — unjustly held, abused, subjected to psychological and physical torture for nothing more than fidelity to “truthfulness, compassion and forbearance” — refused to reveal their names when taken into custody. They feared reprisal against relatives and other practitioners. Their anonymity made them vulnerable to having their lives taken from them to provide organs for transplants.

The most gruesome testimony came from Chinese doctors who told Mr. Gutmann that some of the organs for transplant came from still-living victims.

Yes, these reports of horror sanctioned by a modern state beg for evidence, and proof is in short supply. But this possibility pushes us into a horrific beyond, a beyond that challenges our language, making “barbaric” too calm a word, too leached of horror.

We all hope these fragmentary reports and the circumstantial evidence do not add up to barbarism. Here, tragically, the track record of other Chinese policies does not give confidence. In China, a mother protesting inadequate sentences meted out to criminals who abducted and sold her 11-year-old daughter into sexual slavery was herself sentenced to re-education through labor. In China, many women are forced to abort their children as routine policy, even in the third trimester. Others endure forced sterilization. In China, the Communist Party stands above the law. We hope there are other explanations for the evidence, but we cannot rest until we know more.

China’s state- and party-controlled media say China’s people know they benefit from the glorious leadership of the Communist Party. The truth is different. China’s people have hearts that yearn for freedom and faith, lungs that long to breathe clean air and eyes that hope to see a better future. When China has become a destination for “transplant tourism,” when aging party cadres receive organs from those in prisons and labor camps, when some of those organs are taken from religious and political dissidents, when the Communist Party speaks of hearts, we know it is not speaking of love, devotion or loyalty. It is thinking of dollar signs.

Rep. Christopher H. Smith, New Jersey Republican, is chairman of the U.S. Congressional-Executive China Commission and the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, global health and human rights.

Read more: Washington Times

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

New Korean Movie Depicts Organ Harvesting in China

 Poster of “The Traffickers” (Quan Yu/The Epoch Times)
 
“The Traffickers” 

SEOUL—A just released movie about organ harvesting in China was rated the top movie currently showing in Korea by Daum, a major Korean web portal.

The plot of The Traffickers, originates in a true story. In 2009, a newly-wed Korean couple traveled to China where the wife was kidnapped and then murdered, with all her organs stolen.

“[Such practice] ignores the dignity of human life. Those who are involved in it, if they exist, are not humans but beasts,” commented lead actor Lim Chang Jung. Lim filmed several dangerous scenes for the movie in China, including one that caused him a bone fracture.

The Honorable David Kilgour, a former member of the Canadian parliament and secretary of state (Asia-Pacific), and Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas published the first comprehensive report on organ harvesting in China in July, 2006. (Bloody Harvest: the killing of Falun Gong for their organs)

The Traffickers is being screened on more than 450 theaters in Korea.
  
More: Epoch Times

China’s Organ Trafficking Crackdown Increases Forced Organ Harvesting

On Feb. 23 in Dongguan City in southern China’s Guangdong Province a Mr. Shu showed up at the local hospital with a tall tale. He told a doctor in the emergency room that he had awakened in his hotel room, found one kidney missing, and 20,000 yuan ...

In early August China’s state-run media reported that since April police had arrested 28 groups engaged in organ trafficking in 18 provinces.

David Matas is the co-author (with David Kilgour) of Bloody Harvest: the killing of Falun Gong for their organs, the groundbreaking investigation into the atrocity of forced, live organ harvesting in China. He says the current crackdown on organ trafficking should not be confused with any suppression of forced, live organ harvesting, which continues.

“The current [Chinese] law allows for living donor sourcing from relatives,” Matas wrote in an email. “There has been fraud in the use of this exception, which the authorities have been trying to control.”

Political commentator Zhang Tianliang told New Tang Dynasty TV that China transplants tens of thousands of organs a year, and that hospitals have to rely on a large bank of organs, not a few dozen criminal gangs, for such a large volume.

“The donor and the organ have to match,” Zhang said. “No hospital can guarantee this match. This means that any hospital that does a large amount of transplantation must have a systematic donor source.”

Investigators who have analyzed China’s organ transplantation believe that the great majority of organs come from detained Falun Gong practitioners, who are killed in the process of having their organs removed.

More: Epoch Times

Hu Exits as Party’s Crisis Remains Unresolved


Missed Opportunity

Whether Bo was involved in the planning of Heywood’s murder—he had as much reason as Gu to wish the Brit dead—is not known. But eventually the truth will come out about Bo and Gu’s involvement in organ harvesting and the selling of the corpses of Falun Gong practitioners to factories in Dalian that turn the corpses into exhibition pieces.

Hu has apparently chosen the way of least resistance by not settling now the question of Bo’s guilt for crimes against humanity and, through a prosecution of Bo, the guilt of the faction of which Bo was a leading member.

Hu may have feared that a full revelation of Bo’s crimes would have damaged the Party beyond repair.

Hu may have feared that a full revelation of Bo’s crimes would have damaged the Party beyond repair. He may have also feared that Bo’s political allies would have taken revenge on him for his handling of Bo or even prevented Hu from acting.

By temporizing, Hu has left the issue of the guilt of Bo and Jiang’s faction as a time bomb that will blow up in the future with unknown repercussions.

More: Epoch Times

Book Exposes Organized Killing for Organs in China

 "State Organs: Transplant Abuse in China" Edited by David Matas and Dr. Torsten Trey

Everyone knows the overwhelming source is “executed prisoners”—but in China, who does that include?

State Organs: Transplant Abuse in China, published in July with contributions from a dozen specialists in the field aims to answer that question and elucidate the broader [...]

Several of the essays in the book examine this question and conclude, as previous studies have, that a primary source of organs has been prisoners of conscience, specifically practitioners of Falun Gong, who disappeared by the hundreds of thousands into the communist regime’s system of prisons and labor camps. Those institutions then work closely with military hospitals to turn the bodies into profits. While they languish in prison camps, they are blood tested and put onto a registry, and when they are matched with a recipient they are taken away and killed for their organs, according to the available research.

David Matas estimates that every year, to supply 10,000 transplants, 1,000 death row prisoners are killed for their organs, 500 transplants come from living donor relatives, 500 come from Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Eastern Lightning House Christians, and 8,000 come from Falun Gong practitioners.
  
More: The Epoch Times