THE Australian embassy in Beijing has been asked to investigate claims that Chinese officials harvest and sell the body parts of dissidents.
The issue was raised in Canberra yesterday with a Chinese delegation of foreign, judicial and security officials.
The Foreign Affairs Department deputy secretary, David Ritchie, spoke about the claims with the Assistant Foreign Minister, Cui Tiankai. After being questioned by journalists on several alleged rights abuses, Mr Cui said: "It always puzzles me why some people are always interested in a very small number of people who violated the law, while paying very little attention to the interests and concerns of the overwhelming majority of law-abiding citizens in China."
The former Canadian secretary of state for Asia and the Pacific, David Kilgour, has backed a report alleging there is a trade in the body parts of Falun Gong dissidents.
After verifying tape recordings of conversations between people posing as body parts buyers and detention centre officials, he believed it was "simply inescapable" that abuses were occurring.
Chinese officials recently took foreign diplomats and journalists to a hospital in an attempt to disprove the claims.
Mr Cui, who raised concerns yesterday about Falun Gong protests outside the Chinese embassy in Canberra, said the hospital visit proved there was no evidence to support the claim of a body parts trade.
Mr Ritchie said the Canberra meeting was part of an annual China-Australia human rights dialogue and that issues of concern raised included aspects of labour and political rights as well as media freedom.
Mr Cui said yesterday's dialogue had been "frank, friendly and fruitful".