China Harvests Human Organs

In 2014 China said that it would stop harvesting organs from state prisoners. In 2015, we found out that promise was a ruse.

The country’s deputy minister of public health, Dr. Jiefu Huang, had announced in 2014 that China would stop harvesting any organs from prisoners by January of the next year.

But then China went back, and said (in essence), as long as the prisoners say yes to their organs being donated, it counts as a citizen donation. Dr. Huang told the Beijing Times, “Once the organs from death row prisoners who have voluntarily donated are included in our national distribution system, they are counted as voluntary citizen donations.”

The problem is that we have no way of knowing if these “donations” are really voluntary. When you have a country like China where hospitals are advertising online that you can come and they will get you a liver within weeks, the likelihood is that they’re going out, finding prisoners that will match these transplant tourists that are willing to pay top dollar for an organ, and then executing them.

Dr. Arthur Caplan, founding director of the Medical Ethics Division at New York University (who now serves as a professor in my home state at the University of Pennsylvania), said that death is timed for waiting organ recipients, especially “transplant tourists” and that if you go to China and want a liver transplant in the three weeks you’re visiting, someone has to locate a prisoner that matches your biology and kill him or her while you’re there. Dr. Caplan terms it, “killing on demand.” 

Unfortunately, although some estimate that around one million in China would benefit from a transplanted organ, the Chinese are not comfortable with organ donation. The country has no cadaver or organ system at all. Yet, statistics from the Chinese government maintain that over ten years it transplanted more than 20,000 livers; 1,475, it said, came from living donors.

Now, beyond the fact that “killing on demand” is probably occurring, prisoners eligible for execution in China are often in prison for suspect reasons. The list of qualifiers for death row includes minor petty crimes and political or religious dissidence.

In order for society to flourish, freedom of speech and religion must also flourish. People must not be afraid that adhering to their conscience will result in the state harvesting their organs, imprisoning them, or murdering them. In China, there is an entire class of people whose rights are so vulnerable that they can be imprisoned, executed, and harvested simply because of what they believe.

I serve as Co-Chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, where we are dedicated to advocating for internationally recognized human rights and norms across the globe. The Chinese government is one of the world’s biggest violators of fundamental human rights, and something must change.

This week in Congress, the House passed a resolution by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) to condemn state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience in China.

This resolution will spotlight China’s brutal organ transplant market, and hopefully move it to create an infrastructure to handle organ transplants in an ethical manner.

The House also passed the STOP Organ Trafficking Act, which would make it the policy of the United States to combat illegal organ trafficking by promoting other countries’ adoption of effective voluntary organ donation systems. The bill would also prohibit the issuing of a passport to anyone convicted of trafficking human organs.

It’s time for China to stop harvesting organs from prisoners, but furthermore, it’s time for its government to stop targeting individuals with dissenting political and religious views. As a country, we must take a strong stance on the human rights climate in China, and do everything we can to actively stop the suppression of freedom there and around the globe.

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