Organ Transplantation in The People's Republic of China - International Concerns

International Concerns

Transplantation first began in the early 1970s China, when organs were sourced from executed prisoners. Although other sources, such as brain-dead donors, had been tried, the lack of legal framework hampered efforts. Dr Klaus Chen said in 2007 that this was still the dominant pool. Concerns that some poorer countries were answering donor shortages by selling organs to richer countries led the World Medical Association (WMA) to condemn the purchase and sale of human organs for transplantation at Brussels in 1985, and at Stockholm in 1994. In Madrid in 1987, the World Health Organization (WHO) condemned the practice of extracting organs from executed prisoners due to the difficulty of knowing if they had given consent. Growing concern led other professional societies and human rights organisations to condemn the practice in the 1990s, and to question the way in which the organs were obtained. The WHO starting drafting an international guideline (WHA44.25) on human organ transplants in 1987 which resulted in the WHO Guiding Principles on Human Organ Transplantation being endorsed in 1991. However, the wording did not allow the international community to draw up any laws preventing China from continuing to trade in human organs.

The United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations convened a hearing in 1995 on the trade in human body parts in China; receiving evidence from various sources including statements from Amnesty International, the BBC, and Chinese government documents produced by human rights activist Harry Wu.

The World Medical Association, the Korean Medical Association, and the Chinese Medical Association reached an agreement in 1998 that these practices were undesirable and that they would jointly investigate them with a view to stopping them; however, in 2000, the Chinese withdrew their cooperation. Amnesty International claimed to have strong evidence that the police, courts and hospitals were complicit in the organ trade, facilitated by the use of mobile execution chambers, or "death vans". Amnesty speculated that this profitable trade might explain China's refusal to consider abolishing the death penalty, which is used on between 1,770 (official figure) and 8,000 (Amnesty estimates) prisoners annually. Corpses are typically cremated before relatives or independent witnesses can view them, fuelling suspicions about the fate of internal organs.

In June 2001, Wang Guoqi, a Chinese doctor applying for political asylum, made contact with Harry Wu and his Laogai Research Foundation, who assisted Wang in testifying to the US Congress in writing that he had removed skin and corneas from more than 100 executed prisoners for the transplant market at the Tianjin Paramilitary Police General Brigade Hospital, and that during at least one such operation the prisoner was still breathing. Wang, a 'burns specialist', said that he had also seen other doctors remove vital organs from executed prisoners; and the hospital where he worked sold those organs to foreigners. Harry Wu said that he had gone to "great lengths" to verify Wang's identity and that both the foundation and congressional staff members found the doctor's statements "highly credible."

By 2005 the WMA had specifically demanded that China cease using prisoners as organ donors. In December of that year, China's Deputy Health Minister acknowledged that the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners for transplant was widespread – as many as 95% of all organ transplants in China derived from executions, and he promised steps to prevent abuse. According to Time, a transplant brokerage in Japan which organised 30–50 operations annually sourced its organs from executed prisoners in China. Edward McMillan-Scott, vice president of the European Parliament, said he believed that nearly 400 hospitals in China had been involved in the transplant organ trade, with websites advertising kidney transplants for $60,000.

On the eve of a state visit to the United States by President Hu Jintao, the 800-member British Transplantation Society also criticised China's use of death-row prisoners' organs in transplants, on the grounds that as it is impossible to verify that organs are indeed from prisoners who have given consent; the WMA once again condemned the practice on similar grounds. A BBC news report by Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in September 2006 showed negotiations with doctors in No 1 Central Hospital in Tianjin for a liver transplant.

In 2006, claims of harvesting of organs from live practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual movement at a research hospital led to an investigative report being compiled by former Canadian politician, David Kilgour, and human rights lawyer David Matas. The findings of their investigation were controversial as the conclusions were based on circumstantial evidence, The report outlines extraordinarily short wait times for organs in China—one to two weeks for a liver compared with 32.5 months in Canada (median wait for 2003) as an incriminating factor. Kilgour and Matas also present self-accusatory material from Chinese transplant centre Web sites that advertise the immediate availability of large numbers of organs from living donors. Organ price lists were available on Chinese hospital Web sites. Investigations, including by dissident Harry Wu, and the U.S. State Department, failed to find evidence to support the allegations, though Kirk C. Allison, Associate Director of the Program in Human Rights and Medicine in the University of Minnesota, (2006) and Tom Treasure of Guy's Hospital, London (2007), considered the report "plausible from a medical standpoint" based on the numerical gap in the number of transplants and the short waiting times in China compared with other countries. In May 2008 two United Nations Special Rapporteurs reiterated their previous request for the Chinese authorities to adequately respond to the allegations, and to explain the source of organs which would account for the sudden increase in organ transplants in China since 2000. China has repeatedly denied the organ harvesting allegations in the report.

In June 2011 the US added a question to its DS-160 application for non-immigrant visas. The application asks if the person has ever taken part in forced human organ transplantation.

No straight answers have been produced by the Chinese regime over the allegations of state-sanctioned organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners, said Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.“The Chinese government has yet to come clean and be transparent,” said Nowak in an interview with The Epoch Times. “It remains to be seen how it could be possible that organ transplant surgeries in Chinese hospitals have risen massively since 1999, while there are never that many voluntary donors available.” Nowak has submitted two reports to the U.N. Human Rights Council formally requesting the Chinese regime respond to the allegations. The report states, in part, that, “The practitioners were given injections to induce heart failure, and therefore were killed in the course of the organ harvesting operations or immediately thereafter.” “Nothing seems to have changed for the better,” said Nowak. The majority of the inmates in the forced labor camps were Falun Gong members. And that is so frightening, because none of these people were ever given the benefit of a trial. They were never charged”, he said.

On 12 September 2012, the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs heard the testimonies of experts about organ harvesting in China. Ethan Gutmann, an investigative journalist, referred to the body of witness testimony, much of which he has wrangled, from former surgeons and nurses who have direct knowledge of organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience. He has also interviewed imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners who have been tested for their blood type, which is needed for their organs to be harvested. He lamented the lack of interest in the West in the evidence that he and others have worked to accumulate, and urged the committee to invite the witnesses to be cross-examined. Dr. Gabriel Danovitch, a professor of medicine at UCLA, noted the efforts that international medical organizations have made to change abusive Chinese organ sourcing practices. Dr. Damon Noto, the spokesman with the medical society Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, presented a careful historical analysis of the beginnings of organ harvesting by the CCP, and ran through a narrative that led to the ultimate conclusion that the Party has harvested the organs of up to 60,000 Falun Gong prisoners of conscience. The CCP’s military apparatus began with death row prisoners in the 1990s and after 1999 moved on to the newly persecuted Falun Gong population. There was an “exponential increase in transplantations” from 2000 onward, Noto said.

Arthur Caplan, a Professor of Medical Ethics and the Director of the Langone Medical Center and School of Medicine of New York University, said that the release of any information on forced organ removal is the first step in stopping the practice. "Having this release of information is very important. I am very pleased that these Congressmen have called for this release and I hope that the state department responds quickly”, he said. He also said the evidence that this is happening in China should not be in question. Dr. Caplan also called on the American scientific and medical community to actively boycott transplant information and research coming from China.