RADIO
FREE EUROPE
By Breffni
O'Rourke
PRAGUE, October
13, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Western countries are beginning to pay high-level attention
to accusations that Chinese authorities are killing jailed members of the banned
Falun Gong spiritual movement in order to sell their body parts for organ
transplants.
A subcommittee of the
U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on the accusations on September 29.
The matter was also raised at foreign-minister level at the China-European Union
summit meeting on September 9 in Helsinki.
Commissioned
Research
The allegations gained fresh momentum as a
result of a report published on July 6 by two Canadian human rights lawyers, who
examined in detail claims that the Chinese authorities are killing prisoners in
order to sell their organs at home and overseas.
A Falun Gong association in
North America asked the two lawyers, David Matas and David Kilgour, to help them
investigate allegations that prisoners not sentenced to death by any court were
being killed.
There were some 60,000 transplant
operations in China between 2000 and 2005, but Matas and Kilgour estimate that
just 18,000 organ donations in that period came from official sources.
The two are experienced human rights lawyers. Kilgour is a former
Canadian secretary of state, and Matas is a well-known specialist in refugee,
immigration, and rights issues.
They say in their report that
they have not found any hard evidence to prove these grave charges against
China. Nevertheless, Kilgour and Matas claim to have established a sequence of
circumstantial evidence that suggests such a trade is going on. It involves
victims, in particular, from the Falun Gong.
Beijing
Denial
Kilgour and Matas were not allowed to visit China
in person. As they point out, after such organ removals are purportedly carried
out, an empty operating room holds no clues. Nor do the bodies remain:
Authorities are said to cremate the remains after the liver, kidney, heart or
other organs are removed.
The Chinese government
rejects the whole story as "extremely irresponsible." The political counselor at
the Chinese Embassy in Australia, Ou Boqian, told RFE/RL that the accusation is
totally false.
"Let me say, putting it briefly, that this is
really a fabricated story; it does not exist," Ou said.
She noted
that the international press was invited to view some medical facilities that
Falun Gong named as killing centers, and they found nothing amiss.
Many Went In...
When it was banned by Chinese
authorities in 1999, the Falun Gong had tens of millions of members -- many
thousands of whom were arrested or sent to labor or reeducation camps. U.S.
officials have estimated that police ran hundreds of reeducation camps with a
holding capacity of 300,000 people.
Lawyers Matas and Kilgour say
many of the rounded-up Falun Gong declined to give their identification details
to authorities, fearing that their families would suffer. This protected the
families, they say, but at the same time left the prisoners untraceable by their
families -- and made it easier for the prisoners to quietly disappear. Could
these be at least some of the donors for China's massive organ-transplant
business?
According to figures supplied by the vice chairman of
the China Medical Organ Transplant Association, Professor Bingyi Shi, there were
some 60,000 transplant operations carried out in China between 2000 and
2005.
But Matas and Kilgour estimate that only about 18,000 organ
donations in that period came from official sources -- that is, individuals
donating their organs posthumously or from formally executed death-row
prisoners. They say this leaves a shortfall of some 40,000 organ donations, and
wonder aloud where those organs came from.
Sufficient
Incentive?
Certainly a motive for criminal activity is
provided by the profits to be made from organ transplanting. The China
International Transplantation Network Assistance Center in Shenyang earlier this
year carried a list of prices for body parts. The list put the price of a kidney
at $62,000, of a liver at $130,000, the same for a heart, and of a lung at
$150,000.
These huge prices are set against a backdrop of
wide-ranging corruption among officials, despite the efforts of the Communist
Party to stamp it out. With such profits to be made, it's easy to see how the
system could be abused.
Leading human rights groups are taken
aback by the scale of the horrendous allegations against China, and are trying
to establish what is really going on.
"We have been trying to find
out more, obviously, because the allegations are very, very serious," said
Amnesty International's Anna Kltalahti. "I mean, if something like that would
happen, it would be very serious indeed. But we have not been able to get very
far in our investigations."
Soliciting
'Donations'
But Falun Gong claims to have more evidence.
Falun Gong members in North America say they telephoned various hospitals,
prisons, and other institutions in China posing as organ buyers, recording the
resulting conversations.
In one such conversation -- to the Mishan
City Detention Center in Hailongjiang province on June 8 -- a staff member tells
the caller that they have "Falun Gong [organ] suppliers."
Question: "Do you have Falun Gong [organ] suppliers?
Answer:
"We used to have, yes."
Question: "What about now?"
Answer: "Yes."
Question: "Can we come to select, or do you
supply directly to us?"
Answer: "We provide them to
you."
Question: "What about the price?"
Answer: "We
discuss after you come."
Meanwhile, a Chinese woman interviewed by
Matas and Kilgour claimed her husband was a surgeon who told her he had
personally removed the eye corneas from 2,000 anesthetized Falun Gong prisoners
in northeast China, during a two-year period to October 2003. She said her
husband later refused to continue the grisly work.
Open To
Abuse
The Chinese government in 2005 confirmed for the
first time that it used organs from tried and executed prisoners. To human
rights groups, this is already an exploitive approach to the body-parts issue,
because it implies criminals could be sentenced to death more readily in order
to have their organs.
"What is already established and admitted by
the Chinese authorities is that organs are taken from condemned death-penalty
prisoners," says Human Rights Watch's Kltalahti. "And also that is impossible to
monitor, because of the lack of transparency surrounding the death penalty in
China."
The legal situation in China has left the door open to
abuse in the organ-transplant business.
Until July 1, there were
no laws requiring written permission from organ donors. Nor did institutions
have to verify that organs came from legal sources. Nor did ethics committees
have to approve each transplant in advance.
The Chinese government
says that nevertheless, all transplant operations took place voluntarily
according to the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO), which
includes most of the conditions just mentioned.
In July,
legislation has come into force setting these conditions as legal requirements.
But as Matas and Kilgour point out, implementing laws that are on the statute
books has not always been China's strength.
They say it is unclear whether this organ harvesting -- if
it is occurring -- is backed by official policy in Beijing, or whether it is a
result of greed of individual hospitals that have literally been able to get
away with murder.