Organ Harvesting in China: Killing to Save Lives
Hania Kaoud
October 20th, 2019
China has one of the largest organ donor programmes in the world and, arguably, a very successful one. In recent decades, China’s high number of transplants, short waiting times - which are between a few days to a few weeks - and the active market for organs (until organ trade was made illegal in 2006) sparked suspicion and wariness in the ethicality of the organ donation and transplant system in China.
Over a span of 32 years (1977-2009) there were 130 deceased organ donors in China. The number of organ transplantations claimed by China in a similar time period was 120,000. The organs and tissue of one donor can save eight people and be used for up to 50 transplants, which puts China’s total transplantations eleven times higher than it should be. So where were these organs coming from? In December 2005, China’s Deputy Health Minister, Huang Jiefu, confirmed that 95% of its organs from deceased donors were prisoners, around 65% of all transplants. Many of these prisoners who ‘donated’ their organs were executed on death row. This is especially alarming, considering China has the highest number of executions per year in the world. Numerous non-violent crimes are punishable by death in China, including drug trafficking and prosititution. Although China requires consent from prisoners, the circumstances under which consent is obtained are almost impossible to identify. If a body is left unclaimed by a family, China claims they have the right to harvest its organs. The whereabouts of prisoners are often unknown to their families, who are left wondering for years if their family members are alive. This further complicates the situation under which the organs were acquired.
The World Health Organization (WHO) along with other international organizations and states have condemned organ sourcing from prisoners and has called for China to disavow the practice. In 2014, after many independent investigations, tribunals and requests from the international community, China announced that they would stop organ procurement from prisoners. Five years later, not only has there been no evidence of China giving up this practice, but there is new evidence of unconsented organ harvesting of ethnic and religious minorities.
In 2006, the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China (CIPFG) asked David Kilgour and David Matas, two Canadian lawyers, to do an independent investigation into the transplant abuse in China which specifically targeted members of the Falun Gong, a religious minority that has been persecuted since 1999. The Kilgour-Matas report gave evidence of the systematic abuse and organ harvesting of the Falun Gong community. The report also stated in detail the shocking revelation that the forced harvesting was done on living Falun Gong practitioners. Other human rights groups and organizations have done their own investigations that have led to more discoveries of human rights violations.
The Falun Gong are not the only minority group that the Chinese government is targeting. Tibetans, Buddhists and Christians have also been subject to similar treatment by the Chinese state. The Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group in the region of Xinjian, have been put in what the Chinese government calls ‘re-education camps.’ Random Muslims are brought to these camps for doing inconsequential acts such as wearing hijab, growing a beard, travelling abroad or even texting someone in another country. In these camps that have been operating since 2014, Muslims are forcibly put to labour, forced to drink alcohol, and sterilized against their will.
In September 2019, the China Tribunal reported to the United Nations Human Rights Council that the Chinese government was harvesting organs from Uyghurs (and other groups) at the concentration camps. Hamid Sabi, a London based lawyer presented evidence that showed that a large number of prisoners were being ‘killed to order’ by the government - likely to procure organs, skin and even their cornea. In the updated report published in 2016, Kilgour and Matas stated that “there are only two places where one can receive the full range of organs from a prisoner of conscience: China and more recently, the territory under the control of the Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS.”
What is happening in China is nothing new. The Falun Gong have been oppressed and tormented for decades, while the conditions of the Uyghurs are similar to what those faced in concentration camps during World War II. The international community has been nearly silent on the violations of human rights in China and while several nations have spoken up, they later retracted their statements or apologized. Despite the overwhelming evidence, the Chinese government continues to deny the practice of organ harvesting on prisoners and religious minorities. It is more important now than ever for the international community to ensure that mistakes of the past are not repeated. As said by Ginetta Sagan, “silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the oppressor.”