China 'harvests organs' report claims

Falun Gong members singled out by Padraig Reidy
 
Issue 1, 2007, Index on Censorship
 
 
A leading Canadian politician has alleged that the Chinese government is harvesting organs from imprisoned members of religious organisation Falun Gong.

Presenting his report, 'Bloody Harvest’, David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State, Asia Pacific, claimed that up to 40,000 organ transplants had been carried out using body parts taken from members of the controversial group imprisoned in labour camps.

While Kligour and co-author David Matas admit that there is no concrete evidence to support their claims directly, they point to the experiences of Falun Gong members who are routinely medically checked while detained. They also point out the remarkable ease with which organs can be obtained by Chinese hospitals: while in most of the western world, finding a suitable donor can take at least two years, Chinese hospitals advertising organ transplants claim that organs can be obtained in a matter of weeks. According to the report, one person who travelled to China for a transplant was presented with four different ‘fresh’ kidneys over a two-week period.

The Chinese government has been engaged in brutal suppression of the Falun Gong movement since 1999. The movement, which has an estimated membership of 70 million in China, claims to be solely focused on ‘mental and physical health’, through exercises in the Chinese Quigong tradition. However, the government has characterised it as an ‘evil cult’.

In a written statement, the Chinese embassy in London told Index:'The evidence in the report, if it can be called evidence, is impossible to be testified [sic]. The practice to collect evidence is to call someone maybe in China who can not be identified, and obtain a lot of amazing stories of organ harvesting. We don’t know what the authors’ intention by doing this. [There are]logic mistakes throughout the full report. A lot of data, like the number of organ transplant operations, cannot accord with each other in the context.'
 
Links
htpp://organharvestinvestigation.net