A new report claims that China is still engaged in the
widespread and systematic harvesting of organs from prisoners, and says that
people whose views conflict with the ruling Chinese Communist Party
are being
murdered for their organs.
The report -- by former Canadian lawmaker David Kilgour,
human rights lawyer David Matas, and journalist Ethan Gutmann -- collates
publicly reported figures from hospitals across China to show what they claim
is a massive discrepancy between official figures for the number of transplants
carried out throughout the country. They blame the Chinese government, the
Communist Party, the health system, doctors and hospitals for being complicit.
"The (Communist Party) says the total number of legal
transplants is about 10,000 per year. But we can easily surpass the official
Chinese figure just by looking at the two or three biggest hospitals,"
Matas said in a statement. The report estimates that 60,000 to 100,000 organs are
transplanted each year in Chinese hospitals.
According to the report, that gap is made up of executed
prisoners, many of them prisoners of conscience locked up for their religious
or political beliefs. China does not report its total number of executions,
which it regards as a secret. The report's findings stand in stark contrast to Beijing's claim
that, since the beginning of 2015, China has moved from almost completely
relying on organs from prisoners to the "largest voluntary organ donation
system in Asia."
At a regular press conference Thursday, Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said China has "strict laws and
regulations on this issue." "As for the testimony and the published report, I want
to say that such stories about forced organ harvesting in China are imaginary
and baseless -- they don't have any factual foundation," she said.
The National Health and Family Planning Commission, which
oversees organ donations in China, did not respond to a request for comment for
this piece.
Patients queue at a hospital in China. More than 300,000 people require organ transplant operations every year |
According to the report, thousands of people are being
executed in China in secret and their organs harvested for use in transplant
operations. So who is being killed? The authors say mainly imprisoned religious
and ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, underground Christians, and
practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.
While much of China's organ transplant system is kept
secret, official figures show that 2,766 volunteers donated organs in 2015,
with 7,785 large organs acquired. The authors point to publicly available statements and
records released by hospitals across China claiming they carried out thousands
of transplant annually, and interviews with and official biographies of
individual doctors who claim to have carried out thousands of transplant
operations during their careers.
"Simply by adding up a handful of the hospitals that
have been profiled in this (report), it's easy to come up with higher annual
transplant volume figures than 10,000," the authors write. According to official statistics, there are more than 100
hospitals in China approved to carry out organ transplant operations. But the
report states the authors have "verified and confirmed 712 hospitals which
carry out liver and kidney transplants," and claims the number of actual
transplants could be hundreds of thousands larger than China reports.
Source: CNN
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