Government must condemn Chinese illegal harvesting of organs Medicine Weekly, Ireland An Irish MEP has called on the Government to immediately condemn the illegal organ harvesting of unwilling Chinese prisoners after an independent investigation reported evidence that members of a Buddhist group were being deliberately targeted for organ removal by the Chinese government. The two-month independent investigation, carried out by international human rights lawyers and the former Canadian Secretary of State for the Asia-Pacific region, found evidence that members of the Falun Gong sect held in custody by China were being forced to have “their organs removed in a deliberate and systematic way” for resale to others awaiting transplants. The Falun Gong group has been banned in China since 1999 for ‘illegal activities’, but its suppression is generally seen as a human rights violation by international organizations. When other prisoners were included, a total of 41,000 transplants between 2000 and 2005 could not be accounted for by the Chinese government. Speaking after the publication of the findings, Mr Simon Coveney, Fine Gael MEP and human rights spokesperson for the EU parliament group EPP-ED, said Ireland must speak out to publicly condemn the harvesting. He added that plans were already in place to hold an EU Parliament hearing on illicit organ harvesting of Chinese people in September. News of the report’s findings has followed the move by more than 20 members of the World Health Assembly (WHA) to call on China to immediately end its practice of using prisoners as organ donors. In response to previous reports of Chinese prisoners being executed before their organs were harvested, the WHA meeting in Divonne-les-Bains, France, earlier this year passed a resolution stressing the importance of free and informed choice in organ donation.

Tuesday, 25 July 2006