| Western nations report that they have not found any
hard evidence to prove charges against China
| |
| Spero News |
| Monday, October 16,
2006 |
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.
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. |