China Denies Charges, as Others See Substance to Lawyers’ Claims

CounterPunch, Oct 1-15, 2006, VOL 13, No.17

By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

The Kilgour/Matas report alleging traf- ficking in the organs of Falun Gong was published on July 6, 2006. The Chinese government, through its embassy in Ottawa, dismissed the report, calling it “groundless and biased” and “based on rumours and false allegations”.

Human rights activist Harry Wu, a former political prisoner in China who now lives in the U.S., has expressed strong doubts about the Kilgour/Matas report’s conclusions. Wu, who spent 15 years gathering information about the “harvesting” of organs from convicts executed in China, says he sent two investigators to Shenyang, one of the places where the Kilgour/Matas report said Falun Gong practitioners were being held to provide organs for transplantation. According to Wu, his investigators confirmed that Falun Gong prisoners were being held at the prison there, but could not corroborate the report’s claims of illegal organ harvesting.

In August, commenting on the report’s allegation that one surgeon (according to his former wife’s testimony) had removed about 2,000 corneas from Falun Gong practitioners over a period of two or three years beginning in 2001, Wu told the South China Post that organ harvesting on that scale “would be impossible” and that “professional doctors would not do this.”

While crediting Wu’s long record as a human rights activist, David Matas responded that he and Kilgour have consulted medical experts who told them that “the process of removing the eyes takes only about 20 minutes”, and that a skilled surgeon could remove 2,000 corneas in as few as 83 working days.

On July 24 during the first World Transplant Congress in Boston Dr. Kirk Allison, director of the Program on Human Rights and Medicine at the University of Minnesota, released a statement supporting the conclusions of the Kilgour/Matas report and calling on his colleagues to end cooperation with China on organ transplants.

Also on July 24 attorney Terri Marsh, director of Human Rights International (HRI) in Washington, D.C., filed information with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston alleging that two high ranking Chinese physicians, hospital administrators who were attending the World Transplant Congress at the time, had violated U.S. laws against torture. Marsh alleged that Chen Zhonghua, president of Tongji Hospital Transplantation Research Institute in Wuhan City and Zhu Tongji, the dean of Zhongshan Hospital Organ Transplant Center in Shanghai, were complicit in the illegal harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners’ organs and asked that they be detained and prosecuted under the U.S. Torture Criminal Statute and the international convention outlawing torture that was approved and implemented by the U.S. in 1994. On July 26 Marsh presented information alleging that a third Chinese doctor, Shen Zhonyang, director of the Oriental Organ Transplant Center in Tianjin had violated U.S. anti-torture laws.

The three Chinese physicians were cited in these allegations because doctors in the hospitals they oversee had admitted in phone conversations recorded by Kilgour and Matas that the sources of their hospitals’ transplanted organs included Falun Gong practitioners. According to an article in the CounterPunchAugust 7 edition of Legal Times, Marsh’s allegations against the three Chinese physicians are among “more than a dozen similar actions against high level Chinese officials” which she and her HRI law partner Morton Sklar have filed in courts across the U.S. in an effort to assert the “universal jurisdiction” provision, which allows human rights violators anywhere in the world to be prosecuted in U.S. courts.

The Legal Times article observes that the U.S. government displays what it called a “precarious if not contradictory position...when it comes to diplomacy with China”. In July, the article says, “the U.S. Justice Department filed a ‘statement of interest’ in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asking judge Richard Leon to drop a case against Bo Xilai, China’s Minister of Commerce, who was sued in the D.C. court for his part in allegations of “systematic human rights abuses against the Falun Gong.”

“On the one hand”, the article notes, the State Department’s annual human rights reports routinely condemn China’s treatment of minorities, including the Falun Gong. Yet the exigencies of commercial and geopolitical relationships with China have forced the U.S. government to take a position at odds with its public statements.”

Marsh has not heard from James Farmer, the U.S. attorney in Boston with whom her complaints were filed. On October 5 Samantha Martin, press liaison officer for the Boston office of the U.S. attorney, confirmed that information alleging violations of U.S. law by the three Chinese physicians were received in July, but was unable to comment on whether an investigation is being conducted or whether any action will be taken as a result of Marsh’s allegations.

A month before the Kilgour-Matas report was released, Edward McMillan-Scott, vice president of the European Parliament wrote in the Yorkshire Post what he had heard from Falun Gong practitioners on secret atrocities of the Chinese regime: “Nearly 400 hospitals in China share the booming trade in transplants, with websites advertising new kidneys for $60,000. Administrators tell inquirers: “Yes, it will be a Falun Gong, so it will be clean.” The two practitioners with whom he spoke went missing after they met with him. On August 3, in an editorial commenting on a story it carried on that date by reporter Gregory M. Lamb, the Christian Science Monitor said that Kilgour and Matas “have put their own considerable reputations on the line to stand behind their report”, and characterized the report’s evidence as “circumstantial but persuasive”. The editorial concluded by suggesting that “to gain the credibility it seeks for (hosting the Olympics) in 2008, China should provide transparent evidence to prove to the world that such outrageous practices are not being conducted”.

On August 14 the U.S. National Kidney Foundation (NKF) released a statement in response to the Kilgour-Matas report noting that “if these allegations prove true, they represent a systematic and widespread violation of human rights against thousands, or potentially tens of thousands, of innocent persons”. The NKF warned against the dangers of what it called “transplant tourism” and reiterated its opposition to “any system of reimbursement for deceased or living donations, which may create an additional financial incentive for abuses in donation and transplantation.” CP