We are now seeing international pressure ratchet up and this would never happen if the problem were actually been addressed, This is a true crime against humanity that has been willfully organized at the highest levels on a 'for profit' basis. China is not scared of the Falun Gong and as far as i can see, this does not apply to Islamic radicals.
The wheels of justice are grinding against all those involved and may ultimately succeed. They are also serving to overtake those leaders complicit in this crime who believed themselves untouchable.
Most all genocides are tribal bloodlettings and to a great degree, the Jewish holocaust fits that description. It allowed the highly intense nationalism of war to be converted into usable blood lust. This is a genocide against a faux tribe with no political stroke. Add in State coercion on the professionals and away we go.
I do not know whether we can end this but we can make it pricy and despised. That will not stop Uncle Charlie who is desperate from been a buyer.
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The Killing of Falun Gong for Their Organs: Recent Developments
By David Matas | July 6, 2015
Last Updated: July 6, 2015 6:45 pm
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1417963-the-killing-of-falun-gong-for-their-organs-whats-new/3/
Falun
Gong practitioners hold a banner in reference to organ harvesting of
practitioners that is still happening today inside China. (Edward
Dai/Epoch Times)
This article presents remarks by David Matas to a public forum at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, on June 28, 2015.
I want to focus on seven new developments: the new legislation in
Italy and Taiwan, a study of proposed legislation in South Australia, an
upcoming conference in China, forced blood testing of Falun Gong
practitioners who are not subject to detention, a study engaged by the
World Health Organization and a recent Council of Europe Convention.
1. Italy
The Italian Senate on March on March 4, 2015, passed a bill which
provides that any person who trades, sells or manages illegally
trafficked organs from living persons would serve a prison term of 3 to
12 years and pay a hefty fine from 50,000 to 300,000 euros. The bill
sets out a punishment for whoever publicly encourages or advertises the
selling of organs or transplant tourism. Doctors who promote or assist
patients to travel to obtain an organ illegally would face lifetime
disqualification for violating medical ethics.
The bill was driven by evidence of organ transplant abuse in China. Senator Maurizio Romani is quoted
as saying, in answer to the question, “Where do China’s 10,000
transplanted organs a year come from?”: “The answer is dramatic …
Especially practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong are
killed for their organs. I use the term cannibalism for this matter … We
in Italy can’t stop these violations … But, we have the duty to make
every effort in order not to be accomplices to this.”
Senator Ivana Simeoni said: “There are documents which dispel any
doubt [about the sourcing of organs from practitioners of Falun Gong]…
Only to think about this commoditization of the human body makes me
shiver.”
“Especially practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong are killed for their organs.”
The bill has to be enacted by the Chamber of Deputies for it to
become law. It is scheduled to go to the Chamber of Deputies this fall.
2. Taiwan
According to a report
in the Taipei Times, the Taiwan legislature, the Yuan, on June 12,
2015, amended The Human Organ Transplantation Act to prohibit the use of
organs from executed prisoners, as well as the sale, purchase and
brokering of organs. The law bans transplant tourism. Additionally,
doctors involved in illegal organ transplants could lose their license.
The Act further stipulates that patients who get organ transplants
overseas must provide legal proof of the source of the organs in order
to be eligible for state funded medical after care in Taiwan. The Act
thus prohibits Taiwanese from receiving organs from unknown sources.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Yu Mei‑nu said that many
Taiwanese go to China for illegal organ transplantations. She added that
the Chinese regime is actively involved in the organ trade, which
depends heavily on the harvesting of organs from living Falun Gong
practitioners. She continued: “We hope to effectively deter organ
trafficking and its sales with this amendment … That is why the law was
amended to require those who have received organ transplants abroad to
provide information to domestic hospitals where they are to receive
post‑transplant treatment about where the surgery was done and who the
surgeons were … The domestic hospitals then have to report the cases
they deal with.”
The effect of this law, according to Theresa Chu, spokesperson for
the Falun Gong Human Rights Legal Team, is to prohibit Taiwanese from
going to China for organ transplants, reported Minghui.org.
Legislator Hsu Shao‑ping of the Kuomintang commented, “Those who
harvest organs from living people and sell them for profit are
committing a crime against humanity according to International Criminal
Law.”
Tien Chiu‑chin, a Taiwanese legislative member from the Democratic
Progressive Party and sponsor of the resolution said: “The Act clearly
forbids organ trafficking, sales, and transplant tourism—and stipulates
penalties. It also bans the use of organs from death row prisoners.
Taiwan’s organ transplant regulations have reached international
standards.”
Falun Gong practicioners act out a scene of stealing human organs to sell during a demonstration in Taipei on July 20, 2014. (Mandy Cheng/AFP/Getty Images)
3. South Australia
The Parliament of South Australia established a Joint Committee on
the Operation of the Transplantation and Anatomy Act 1983 to determine
whether the Act should be amended to address trafficking in human
organs. Written submissions are to be received no later than July 17,
2015.
Member of the New South Wales Parliament David Shoebridge introduced
into that Parliament proposed legislation to prohibit any person from,
(a) entering into a commercial transplant arrangement, (b) removing
tissue from the body of another person, whether living or deceased,
without consent, (c) consenting to the use of tissue removed from the
body of another person, whether living or deceased, for the purpose of
its transplantation to the patient if the tissue was removed without
consent, and the patient knows or is reckless as to that lack of
consent.
The proposed legislation requires medical practitioners and nurses
who provide services to a patient and have reasonable grounds to suspect
that tissue has been transplanted to the patient to report to the
appropriate authority, (a) the name of the patient, (b) when and where
the medical practitioner or nurse provided services to the patient, and
(c) the grounds for suspecting that tissue has been transplanted into
the patient.
Any patient who consents to the transplantation to the patient of any
tissue must report to the appropriate authority the date, location and
nature of the treatment in connection with which the tissue was
transplanted to the patient.
The proposed legislation has extraterritorial effect. The law applies
where either the person committing the prohibited act or the person
from whom the tissue is removed is ordinarily resident in New South
Wales, even where the act itself occurs outside New South Wales. I
suggest that the South Australia Parliament should enact legislation
patterned on that proposal.
“Only to think about this commoditization of the human body makes me shiver.”
4. China Conference
Ostracism has been a vehicle for change in China. The China Medical Tribune reported
the refusal to allow 35 Chinese participants for ethical reasons to
attend the World Transplant Congress in San Francisco in July 2014. It
also noted that for the most recent Hangzhou, China transplant
conference “many overseas transplant experts failed to attend.” A year
before, in October 2013, the China Transplant Congress, also held in
Hangzhou, had a raft of foreign expert attendees.
On Oct. 20, 2014, the NGO Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) released a statement
which provided that, “We would consider it unethical for any foreign
transplant professional to attend this transplant congress in Hangzhou
given the rampant and unrepentant transplant abuse in China, unless the
person is going with the express and sole purpose of speaking out
against it.” This statement, along with other developments, would have
been a drag on overseas transplant expert attendance.
The refusal to allow 35 Chinese participants for ethical reasons to
attend the World Transplant Congress in San Francisco in July 2014 and
the failure of many overseas transplant experts to attend the Hangzhou,
China transplant conference in October 2014 had a profound impact on
Chinese transplant officials. Many attendees to the 2014 Hangzhou
conference were likely asking where all the overseas transplant experts
were. Those doctors who applied to attend and participate in the World
Transplant Congress in San Francisco in July 2014 and were rejected, and
their colleagues who knew they were applying to attend, also needed an
explanation.
The Communist Party may have felt that they could ignore the evidence
of the killing of Falun Gong for their organs. However, they could not
ignore the fact that Chinese transplant doctors were denied admission to
an international transplant congress or that foreign transplant doctors
who had come before to China were no longer coming.
In response to this ostracism, the Communist Party/State made no
substantive changes but did make a wide variety of contradictory
statements about how the situation either is better now or would get
better in the future. I have set out these statements, at length, in a
talk I gave in April 2015, in Bern, Switzerland to the International
Society of Human Rights. The bottom line driving all the remarks was a
desire to end the ostracism. The peer pressure of the international
profession at the very least got the attention of Chinese authorities in
the way that no other initiative had.
There is a Chinese transplant conference scheduled for Aug. 6‑8,
2015, at East Lake in Hubei Province at the International Conference
Centre. The propaganda flowing out of the Party has had an effect on at
least some of the international transplantation profession many of whom
plan to attend this Conference.
While we will not know for sure until the August conference has come
and gone if the peer pressure from the global profession will collapse,
those are the early signs. That collapse would be regrettable.
The criteria for reconnection between the Chinese and international
transplant community should be these: (a) an admission of past
wrongdoing, including full disclosure of the sourcing of organ
transplants in the past; (b) a commitment to bring to justice all
perpetrators of past organ transplant abuse and commencement of
proceedings; (c) expulsion from the Chinese Medical Association of
transplant professionals who cannot establish beyond a reasonable doubt
that their sourcing of organs is proper; (d) cooperation with an
international investigation into present and past sourcing of organs for
transplant; (e) publication of present and past death penalty
statistics; (f) public access to the past and present aggregates for the
four Chinese transplant registries—lung, liver, heart and kidney; (g)
full, independently verifiable transparency of current sourcing of
organs for transplant; (h) establishment of a system of traceability of
sources for transplants and use of that system; and (i) cooperation with
an outside, independent verification system for compliance with
international standards.
5. Forced Blood Testing of Those Not Detained
Systematic blood testing and organ examination of detained Falun Gong
practitioners has been commonplace since 2001 throughout China. The police, beginning in April 2014, have engaged in forced blood testing of practitioners of Falun Gong not in detention.
The practitioners have been arrested in their homes or on the street,
taken to local police stations for forced blood tests and then
released. There has been a concentration of these reports of forced blood testing in Guizhou and Liaoning provinces, but there have also been reports of these tests elsewhere in China.
These tests are presumptively for organ harvesting, unless the
authorities provide an alternative explanation, which they haven’t done.
China has been closing its re-education labor camps which housed
primarily Falun Gong. Some, but not all, of those held in labor camps
have been moved to other detention facilities.
Forced blood testing of the undetained Falun Gong looks to be an
adaptation to the labor camps closing. The labor camps were a vast
forced organ donor bank. If authorities can have that donor bank when
practitioners are living at home, then they don’t need to keep the
practitioners in detention.
This evolution is typical of Communism. Things change but they don’t
get better. They just stay the same or get worse in a different way. Author Ethan Gutmann said about the forced blood testing of Falun Gong not in detention, “This is a truly alarming development.”
6. World Health Organization
The World Health Organization Executive Board in January 2015 passed a resolution which stated:
“The Executive Board, having considered the report by the Secretariat
on blood and other medical products of human origin, (3) recognized that
protection of the donor is a prerequisite in order to meet the needs of
patients for access to safe medical products of human origin, which is
of high importance in the context of access to health and universal
health coverage; (5) recognized that global consensus on the donation
and management of medical products of human origin intended for human
clinical application, based on good governance mechanisms, is needed in
order to protect the fundamental human rights of donors; (6) further
recognized that appropriate standards to guarantee quality and safety of
medical products of human origin and to ensure traceability, vigilance,
surveillance and equitable access to these products are essential for
the well‑being of recipients; (7) requested that the Director‑General
convene consultations with Member States and international partners, to
support the development of global consensus on guiding ethical
principles for the donation and management of the mentioned medical
products of human origin; good governance mechanisms; and common tools
to ensure quality, safety and traceability, as well as equitable access
and availability, as applicable, to result in a document to be submitted
to the Seventieth World Health Assembly for its consideration.”
The Seventieth World Health Assembly is scheduled for May 2017 in
Geneva, Switzerland. We need to be able to track back an organ to its
donor in order to determine whether the donation was voluntary.
Traceability would allow us to do this.
We need to be able
to track back an organ to its donor in order to determine whether the
donation was voluntary. Traceability would allow us to do this.
7. Council of Europe
Both the United Nations and the Council of Europe have treaties on
human trafficking which prohibit the removal of organs for sale without
consent. The Council of Europe has in addition a specific Convention on
organ trafficking. The UN treaty is a protocol to the Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime. The protocol entered into force in
December 2003. The Council of Europe Convention entered into force in
December 2005.
The Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking Human Organs is
much more recent. It opened for signature in March this year, 2015. It
has not yet entered into force.
The first Council of Europe Convention states simply in Article 18,
“Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be
necessary to establish as criminal offences the conduct contained in
article 4 of this Convention, when committed intentionally.”
Article 4 contains the definition of trafficking, which included
organ trafficking. This provision is similar to a provision in the UN
Protocol. The Protocol states, “Article 5, 1. Each State Party shall
adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to
establish as criminal offences the conduct set forth in article 3 of
this Protocol, when committed intentionally.”
The Council of Europe Convention on organ trafficking can be signed
by the member states of the Council of Europe, the European Union and
the non‑member states which enjoy observer status with the Council of
Europe. According to article 28, it can also be signed by any other
non‑member state of the Council of Europe upon invitation by the
Committee of Ministers.
It may well be that not every aspect of transplant tourism is
encompassed by the two Council of Europe Conventions and the UN
Protocol. Nonetheless, all these instruments, I am confident, encompass
travel for transplantation which involves the purchase of an organ
sourced from a prisoner of conscience killed for the organ.
Cover of David Matas’s new book “Why did you do that?” (Seraphim Editions)
The Council of Europe organ trafficking convention is a lot more
specific about the offences which need to be enacted than the treaties
on human trafficking. The organ trafficking convention provides:
“Article 4—Illicit removal of human organs: 1. Each Party shall take the
necessary legislative and other measures to establish as a criminal
offence under its domestic law, when committed intentionally, the
removal of human organs from living or deceased donors: b. where, in
exchange for the removal of organs, the living donor, or a third party,
has been offered or has received a financial gain or comparable
advantage; c. where in exchange for the removal of organs from a
deceased donor, a third party has been offered or has received a
financial gain or comparable advantage.
“Article 7—Illicit solicitation, recruitment, offering and requesting
of undue advantages: 1. Each Party shall take the necessary legislative
and other measures to establish as a criminal offence under its
domestic law, when committed intentionally, the solicitation and
recruitment of an organ donor or a recipient, where carried out for
financial gain or comparable advantage for the person soliciting or
recruiting, or for a third party.
“2. Each Party shall take the necessary legislative and other
measures to establish as a criminal offence, when committed
intentionally, the promising, offering or giving by any person, directly
or indirectly, of any undue advantage to healthcare professionals, its
public officials or persons who direct or work for private sector
entities, in any capacity, with a view to having a removal or
implantation of a human organ performed or facilitated, where such
removal or implantation takes place under the circumstances described in
Article 4, paragraph 1…
“3. Each Party shall take the necessary legislative and other
measures to establish as a criminal offence, when committed
intentionally, the request or receipt by healthcare professionals, its
public officials or persons who direct or work for private sector
entities, in any capacity, of any undue advantage with a view to
performing or facilitating the performance of a removal or implantation
of a human organ, where such removal or implantation takes place under
the circumstances described in Article 4, paragraph 1 …”
Both Council of Europe Conventions address specifically
extraterritoriality. Both Council of Europe Conventions though limit
extraterritoriality to nationals. They do not set out universal
jurisdiction offences.
On extraterritoriality, the UN Convention and Protocol are different
from the two Council of Europe Conventions. The Council of Europe
Conventions require it, using the word “shall.” The UN Convention and
Protocol allow it but do not require it, using the word “may.”
The Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking in Human Organs,
in my view, needs two changes. One is compulsory reporting. As noted,
the Taiwanese legislation requires reporting. There is compulsory
reporting language in proposed Canadian and French legislation.
The second change I would propose to the Council of Europe Convention
is to change Article 10(1) to add (f) “by a person who is present in
its territory” and to modify 10(6) to take out the words “solely on the
basis of his or her nationality.” This change would make organ
trafficking an international or universal jurisdiction crime so that
anyone physically present in the territory could be prosecuted, whether a
national or not.
This issue, whether the draft Convention should create an
international offence of universal jurisdiction, caused division within
the Council at the drafting stage, with 18 states supporting excision of
the quoted words and 20 opposed. Because excision could not get
majority support, I suggest that the Convention have an optional
protocol with the quoted words excised and the proposed words added. The
willing states could then sign the protocol.
Both of the amendments I propose are in my view essential to the
combat against transplant tourism. It is striking that the second should
be so controversial, cleaving Europe in half. The division illustrates
the gap in the field. Not only in Europe, except for Spain, is the
legislation not in place. There is no agreement in principle that it
should be in place.
A poster of the film Human Harvest depicts a meditating Falun Gong practitioner, with prices attached to her organs. (Flying Cloud Productions)
Conclusion
What are the action items for Australia which flow from these
developments? One is legislation in South Australia and, for that
matter, in all states patterned on what Member of Parliament David
Shoebridge has proposed for the Parliament of New South Wales.
A second is continuing a practice of non-contact and non-cooperation
between Chinese and foreign transplant professionals until the criteria
set out earlier are met. I note that Australian Jeremy Chapman is a
former President of the Transplantation Society and that Australian
Philip O’Connell is the current President.
A third is for Australia to join the consultations hosted by the
World Health Organization in order to promote robust ethical principles
on organ transplantation, good governance mechanisms, and common tools
to ensure traceability of organs. A fourth is Australian adhesion to the
Council of Europe Convention on Organ Trafficking. Australian should
request an invitation by the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers to
join this Convention.
Impacting on the Communist Party of China may seem, from the
perspective of Adelaide, to be a daunting task. We must remember that
our primary audience in our efforts is not the Chinese Communist Party,
but rather the family, friends and co-practitioners of the victims.
Whatever else we manage to achieve, we should strive to ensure that the
families, friends and co-practitioners of the victims know that we know
of the victimization and are doing our best to combat it. If we can do
that, we will have at least achieved something.
David Matas is an international human rights lawyer based in
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is the co-author, with David Kilgour, of “Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China.”
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