De Standaard (Belgium): China performs organ harvesting on live prisoners

Falun Gong practitioners are not only ruthlessly persecuted in China. According to an international investigation, they are also forcefully taken as stock for organ transplant, and are being killed for this purpose.

Brussels: Last week the Canadian David Kilgour, former public prosecutor, State Secretary and Member of Parliament, introduced a report in Brussels. He led his investigation together with attorney David Matas, a famous advocate for human rights and defender of torture victims.

The two Canadians gathered a large amount of evidence that the Chinese doctors in labour camps remove organs from Falun Gong practitioners. The organs are transferred to hospitals for transplants, where many foreigners can obtain a kidney, liver or other organs by order.

One of the testimonies is from an ex-wife of a Chinese surgeon. Her husband told her that within a period of two years he removed the corneas of two thousand living prisoners. In 2003 he refused to take part in the operations. The surgeon also said that none of these “donors” survived because other surgeons removed other organs. The remains were incinerated afterwards.

“Such operations are equivalents to murder”, says Kilgour.

The investigation team came to their conclusions through verifying information with various sources, match data and thus building a whole structure of circumstantial evidence.

Among the indications are phone calls to Chinese transplant hospitals by people pretending to be potential customers. In those conversations, hospitals admit that they can find a matching donor within days, and seem to know that Falun Gong practitioners are used for it.

China has already been accused before of harvesting organs without the consent of the involved persons and of executing prisoners when there is a demand for organs. In April, the British Transplant Society accused China of severe human rights violations for that reason.

The British vice President of the European Parliament, Edward McMillan-Scott, said at the press conference in Brussels that a large scale persecution of Falun Gong practitioners is, according to the international definitions, a form of genocide.

He states that the Chinese Gulag of labour camps “deserves an investigation by the United Nations”.
“If new evidence is found about organ harvesting the international community cannot allow the Olympic Games to take place in Beijing in 2008”, he said.

The Belgian lawyer Georges Henri Beauthier said that China only “responds with disdain” on the questions and complains. The famous defender of human rights has filed complaints against the Chinese regime in Belgium and France, based on international jurisdiction. He said that Falun Gong practitioners in our countries are also threatened by the Chinese Communist Party.

“It’s time that the world woke up”, said McMillan-Scott. “There has been a lot of discrete diplomacy; it’s time to go public”.