Surgeons From Chinese Communist Regime Charged with Forced Organ Removal From Living Falun Gong Practitioners

On July 24th, 2006, human rights lawyer Dr. Terri Marsh, representing Falun Gong practitioners whose organs have been harvested without voluntary consent in China and their family members, filed an official criminal complaint with the United States Attorney's Office in Massachusetts. The complaint charged two Chinese surgeons, Chen Zhonghua and Zhu Tongyu with suspected involvement in forced organ removal from living Falun Gong practitioners.

These surgeons were attending the 2006 World Transplant Congress in Boston on July 25th when they were issued with the legal documents. This is the first international human rights complaint Falun Gong practitioners had filed regarding live organ harvesting initiated the Chinese Communist regime.

Chen Zhonghua is Deputy Committee Director of the Chinese Medical Association Organ Transplant Division. He is also head of the Institute at Huazhong University of Science and Technology's Tongji Medical School. The other physician, Zhu Tongyu, is director of the Organ Transplant Research Centre at Shanghai's Zhongshan Hospital. Doctors at both hospitals have previously admitted in phone conversations that transplanted organs from Falun Gong practitioners were available at the hospital. Please refer to "Telephone Messages: Evidences of Harvesting Organs from Live Falun Gong Practitioners in China" at the website of World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) for more information. (http://www.zhuichaguoji.org/en/)

The complaint requests an investigation of doctors Chen Zhonghua and Zhu Tongyu, who are also suspected of performing forced organ removal from illegally detained Falun Gong practitioners.

This criminal complaint charges Chen Zhonghua and Zhu Tongyu with violation of a U.S. anti-torture statute, Title 18, USC Section 2340, and with violation of the Convention Against Torture, ratified in the United States in 1994. The defendants are charged with criminal offenses as head perpetrators or accomplices in the harvesting of organs from living victims, including living Falun Gong practitioners and selling the organs for profit without the victims' consent. The harvesting of organs from living Falun Gong practitioners not only violates the anti-torture statute but is part of the wider crime of genocide, the most serious charge within the framework of international criminal law.

According to the first group of investigation reports recently published by the WOIPFG, Tongji Hospital Organ Transplant Research Institute under Chen Zhonghua is an important research laboratory listed by the Chinese Department of Health. This hospital performed more than 1,000 kidney transplants in February 2005 alone.

Falun Gong practitioners said the complaint itself is not their goal. What they hope for is that all medical staff members working in the organ transplant field in China can free themselves from being accomplices to the Chinese Communist regime by providing evidence of the hospitals crimes, so that they can help end this inhuman persecution.