OTTAWA -- A former federal cabinet minister and a prominent lawyer will report today that they have found credible evidence that the organs of Falun Gong adherents in China are being harvested for paid transplants, and will call for international pressure to stop it.
The report, by former Liberal cabinet minister David Kilgour and Winnipeg immigration and rights lawyer David Matas, will call for international human-rights organizations to take the allegations seriously, and for governments and international bodies to shun China's burgeoning transplant industry until it is stopped.
“Alarming is an understatement,?Mr. Kilgour said yesterday. “We simply can come to no other conclusion than that this is going on, on a large scale. That vital organs are being taken from people involuntarily in large numbers.
“All of the ‘donors' ?in quotation marks ?are killed in process. Because they don't just take one of your kidneys. From what we've learned, they take both of your kidneys, and anything else that anybody might want.?
Many of the alleged victims are in prisons.
Falun Gong practitioners have pressed claims, which China has denied, that their adherents are being used as living organ stocks for transplant centres that offer quick supply of organs to foreign and Chinese people who are willing to pay.
U.S. State Department officials have expressed concern over the allegations, but said they are unable to verify them. The United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said in April he is trying to investigate the claims.
Mr. Kilgour, Canada's former secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific region, said that he and Mr. Matas conducted their two-month investigation through interviews with people in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia, but they were not able to get a visa to visit China.
Some interviewees were Falun Gong practitioners, but many others were not, Mr. Kilgour said. One woman reported that her husband, a doctor, had taken 2,000 corneas from Falun Gong practitioners over a two-year period.
The investigation also included recorded phone calls ?something like a sting operation ?in which callers asked officials at Chinese institutions about obtaining a kidney or a liver for a relative.
“Probably our most damaging evidence for the government of China is the conversations that some of their officials in jails, and hospitals, and even one of the courts, had with people . . . about how they could get organs from Falun Gong practitioners,?Mr. Kilgour said.
“The person will say yes ?in one case I'm thinking of, they say, we've got five or six of them here available, and they're in their 30s, and they're male, so come and sort of pick one out.?
Mr. Kilgour said the report will call for criminal authorities to investigate the allegations for possible prosecution, for human-rights organizations with more resources to conduct their own investigations, and for governments to press for a UN human-rights investigation.
It will also call for governments to shun China's rapidly growing transplant industry, refusing visas to Chinese doctors seeking to travel abroad for transplant training, toughen laws to require doctors to report evidence that patients have received trafficked organs, and prevent or discourage their own citizens from travelling to China for transplants.
The millions of adherents of the Falun Gong movement ?called a meditation practice by some but a religion by others ?are viewed with deep suspicion by the Chinese government.
China denies the many claims of persecution, but its official media portray Falun Gong as a dangerous cult, and Mr. Kilgour said there can be no doubt there has been a massive “propaganda?campaign to discredit it.