Despite its magnitude and seriousness, the crime of organ harvesting in the People’s Republic of China is still underreported and underestimated.
by Marco Respinti*
* A paper presented at the hybrid event “China’s Denial of Human Rights,” hosted at the Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, on January 22, 2024, by CAP-Coordination des Associations & Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience, and supported by other NGOs, during the 45th session of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) Working Group Information meeting, on the eve of the UPR of the People’s Republic of China (January 23).
I salute CAP-LC, Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience, for leading the cause of religious liberty and human rights in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The violations systematically and cruelly perpetrated by the PRC target in fact many religious and ethnic groups, such as Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples living in Xinjiang (that its non-Han inhabitants call East Turkestan), Hui Muslims, Tibetans, Southern Mongols, Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists, Taoists, Falun Gong practitioners, believers of the Church of the Almighty God, and others.
Thanks to CAP, today’s event in such august location, the Palais des Nations, in Geneva, focuses on the obscene refusal of the Beijing government to live up to acceptable standards in the field of human rights for all its citizens, concentrating its attention on the fate of Falun Gong practitioners.
The most recent edition of its annual report on the persecution of its members, published by Falun Gong on January 9, 2024, just a few days ago, shows that the Chinese repressive machine is working promptly. In 2023, Falun Gong added to its records 1,188 Falun Gong practitioners sentenced and 209 killed, bringing to over 5,000 the number of deaths since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began the persecution of that religious movement in 1999.
A substantive part of this deadly scenario is the horrible crime of forced organ harvesting, indeed a crime against humanity and—as it is rightly said now—a cold genocide. This is of course the forcible collection of organs from human beings to feed the lucrative black market of transplants, which exploits the needs and hopes of many suffering people.
Denounces of the organ harvesting horror against Falun Gong began in 2006 to grow and develop, thanks to the scholarly efforts of David Matas (a respected panelist in today’s hybrid event), the late David Kilgour (1941–2022), then Ethan Gutmann as well as Torsten Trey, the founder and executive director of the medical ethics advocacy group, Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH). Several organizations took their work seriously. Beyond DAFOH itself, notably the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), the “China Tribunal” in 2019–2020 and international initiatives such as the “Universal Declaration on Combating and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting” in 2021.
All these efforts contributed much to three important legislative and political documents: the “Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023,” passed almost unanimously by the US House of Representatives on March 27, 2023, the European Parliament Resolution of May 5, 2022, and the European Parliament resolution of January 18, 2024, again just a few days ago, on the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong in the PRC.
These acts of international weight and high moral standard have immense value. Still, not all that is needed has been done yet. Passed in the US House, the “Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023” is stalled in the US Senate. In parallel, despite its magnitude and seriousness the cold genocide of organ harvesting in the PRC is still underreported and underestimated. Too many interests are in fact at stake internationally.
The Chinese black market that profits from organ harvesting counts on the objective complicity of several medical schools and hospitals in the West, guilty at least of not questioning the supply of organs they operate with.
In a September 2022 report on “China’s lack of medical ethics[…] that […] perpetrates ethno-religious genocide,” former vice chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) Nina Shea, and Katrina Lantos, former chair of that same body (and a respected panelist in today’s hybrid event as well), denounced “the American transplant sector,” that, “while adhering to medical ethics at home, openly supports China’s transplant doctors and industry.”
They continued by stating: “Some in the American medical community apparently collaborate in the hope of persuading their Chinese partners to ensure organ donation is indeed voluntary. But when blocked from verifying claims of reform, these same U.S. institutions accept China’s word at face value and even praise its progress. They are not alone in buying China’s lies.” For example, in November 2019 the “BMC Medical Ethics” journal observed: “The World Health Organization, the Transplantation Society, the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences have all provided endorsements of the reforms based on what appears to be contaminated data.”
Lamenting “Western indifference to this issue,” Shea and Lantos commented that “the evidence is too compelling to persist in that naïve belief” of considering organ harvesting “too bad to be true” and conclude that “[u]ntil compliance with international ethical norms is verified, the American transplant sector should halt all collaboration with China’s.”
Building on that, I conclude today by saying that until decent democratic governments clearly ban all collaboration with the murderous PRC’s forced organ transplant industry, Falun Gong practitioners and other guiltless victims will pay the cost of a depraved trade with their innocent blood—of which the whole world is co-responsible.
Marco Respinti is an Italian professional journalist, member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), author, translator, and lecturer. He has contributed and contributes to several journals and magazines both in print and online, both in Italy and abroad. Author of books and chapter in books, he has translated and/or edited works by, among others, Edmund Burke, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, J.R.R. Tolkien, Régine Pernoud and Gustave Thibon. A Senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal (a non-partisan, non-profit U.S. educational organization based in Mecosta, Michigan), he is also a founding member as well as a member of the Advisory Council of the Center for European Renewal (a non-profit, non-partisan pan-European educational organization based in The Hague, The Netherlands). A member of the Advisory Council of the European Federation for Freedom of Belief, in December 2022, the Universal Peace Federation bestowed on him, among others, the title of Ambassador of Peace. From February 2018 to December 2022, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of International Family News. He serves as Director-in-Charge of the academic publication The Journal of CESNUR and Bitter Winter: A Magazine on Religious Liberty and Human Rights.
