CHINA: A protest in Amsterdam against organ harvesting practices and persecution of Falun Gong
A statement by Hans Noot, Director of the Gerard Noodt Foundation for Freedom of Religion or Belief, and Associate Director of Human Rights Without Frontiers at the Dam Square in Amsterdam, on 20 July 2024, during the 25thcommemorative year of Falun Gong persecution in China.
HRWF (25.07.2024) – During the 1980s, China faced a severe shortage of voluntary organ donations for transplants. To address this, its government started using organs from executed prisoners. Allegedly, in 2005 China’s Ministry of Health acknowledged that a great majority of the organs came from prisoner executions. Some researchers put this number as high as 90%.
Ethical concerns deepened in the early 2000s when allegations emerged that the Chinese government was also forcibly harvesting organs from living Falun Gong practitioners. Falun Gong, a spiritual movement founded by Mr. Li Hongzhi, was labeled as 邪教 (xiéjiào), meaning “evil cult” or “unwanted religion,” by the Chinese government in 1999. This designation led to severe persecution of its followers.
Ethical concerns spiraled down even further when investigations by David Matas and David Kilgour brought significant international attention to the issue. Their 2006 report, “Bloody Harvest,” alleged that many Falun Gong practitioners were killed for their organs, which were then sold for transplantation.
Over the following decades, international organizations, including the United Nations and human rights groups such as Human Rights Without Frontiers in Brussels, and the Gerard Noodt Foundation in the Netherlands and many others, continued to scrutinize China’s organ transplant practices. Independent investigations, like the China Tribunal led by Sir Geoffrey Nice in 2019, concluded that forced organ harvesting had been occurring on a large scale, targeting not only executed prisoners, but living, healthy Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetans, and Christian as well. Organ harvesting became big business with the Chinese government and affluent recipients as the benefactors, all at the expense of living victimized humans.
In response to global criticism, China announced reforms to its organ transplant system in 2015, claiming it had discontinued the use of organs from executed prisoners and had established a voluntary donation system. Yet, since then, skepticism persists amongst researchers. Journalists and scientists have found serious inconsistencies in China’s official statistics on voluntary donations and ongoing reports of coercive practices, particularly among the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, where the practice was in full use.
It might not be surprising to know that last year, on June 14 2023, during the 1st Session of the 118th Congress, the U.S. Government introduced bill H.R. 4132, for the imposition of sanctions with respect to forced organ harvesting within China. Some reasons for such serious measures by the U.S. Government are:
- Freedom House in its Freedom in the World 2021 report entry on China stated that “the regime’s campaign to eradicate the Falun Gong spiritual group continued in 2020. Hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners have received long prison terms in recent years, and many others are arbitrarily detained in various ‘legal education’ facilities. Detainees typically face torture aimed at forcing them to abandon their beliefs, sometimes resulting in deaths in custody.” Human Rights Without Frontiers maintains, in fact a list of not hundreds, but thousands of Falun Gong prisoners within China. This list can be looked at on it’s website www.HRWF.eu.
- Even more thousands of Falun Gong practitioners were harassed and arrested during 2020 for practicing their faith, and some likely died due to abuse and torture while in custody and asserted “police protection”. Credible international reports also suggested that organ harvesting, mostly from Falun Gong practitioners, likely continued.” In 2016, Matas, Kilgour, and investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann in an exhaustive report, concluded that it is likely that between 60,000 and 100,000 organ transplants had been conducted per year since 2000, and that Falun Gong practitioners are the main source of organs for transplant in China.
- The campaign against Falun Gong is overseen by central branches of the Chinese Communist Party, including the so-called “Central Leading Group on Preventing and Dealing with Heretical Religions”. On May 12, 2021, Yu Hui, a former Office Director of this group, was targeted for sanctions by the United States Government.
- China’s organ transplantation system does not comply with the majority of the World Health Organization’s Guiding Principles on Human Cell, Tissue and Organ Transplantation, insofar as organs are said to be primarily sourced from prisoners without voluntary consent, that organs are reported to be traded for payment, that the level of transparency and traceability in the organ procurement process is low, and that the Chinese Communist Party has prevented independent or impartial inspection, scrutiny and verificationof its transplant system.
We, human rights activists, who do research concerning such hideous crimes like organ harvesting and persecution of religious people, repeat our message to governments, the public, the medical industry, and especially to the CCP as the main culprit, that such practices need to stop and made illegal; and that doctors who perform these operations and organizations that trade organs in the West and elsewhere, need to be prosecuted. Organ harvesting is a pure form of the debasement of the human race. Those who are involved prove to believe that some humans are more human than others; those with money are worth more than those who allegedly caused crimes against the State, or otherwise belong to groups that teach principles that others disagree with. We assert Mahatma Ghandi’s claim that “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.”