Olympic boycott urged over alleged organ harvesting in China

Monsters and Critics.com - Glasgow,UK
 

Sydney - China is harvesting the organs of members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement and others it claims are dissidents and should lose the right to hold the 2008 Olympic Games, European Parliament Vice President Edward McMillan-Scott said Wednesday.

McMillan-Scott, who was visiting Australia with former Canadian minister David Kilgour to seek support for a boycott of the Beijing Games, told reporters that thousands of Falun Gong members had been killed in China, which considers the meditation movement a deviant sect and proscribed it in 1999.

McMillan-Scott said there was evidence that organs and tissue were harvested in Chinese jails.

'I regret to say I am convinced this is a widespread practice in China,' McMillan-Scott said in Canberra. 'This amounts in my view to genocide.'

He estimated there had been 41,500 involuntary organ removals in China in the six years to 2005.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer refused to meet the pair as did other members of Prime Minister John Howard's government. They were also denied an official welcome to Parliament House.