An independent people’s tribunal based in London has issued its final judgment on March 1, pointing out that China’s state-run practice of killing prisoners of conscience and selling their organs for profit is still happening.
“There is no evidence of the practice having been stopped and the Tribunal is satisfied that it is continuing,” stated the China Tribunal, which is chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, in a 160-page report. There are an additional 300 pages of witness testimonies and submissions.
Nice previously led the prosecution of former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal.
Furthermore, governments’ failure to investigate allegations against China about organ harvesting has allowed “many people to die horribly and unnecessarily,” according to the report.
Crimes
The findings reaffirm the tribunal’s previous conclusion, published in a June 2019 report, that adherents of the spiritual practice Falun Gong have been one of the main sources of organ supply.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline with meditative exercises and moral teachings based on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The practice’s enormous popularity—with 70 million to 100 million followers by the late 1990s, according to official estimates—was deemed as a threat by former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin.
On July 20, 1999, Jiang launched a nationwide persecution to round up adherents and throw them into prisons, labor camps, brainwashing centers, and psychiatric wards, in an effort to force them into renouncing their faith.
The report pointed out that organs harvested from Falun Gong adherents are readily available, based on undercover phone calls to doctors at Chinese transplant hospitals. Other phone calls showed that organ recipients were told the wait time would be about two weeks in China, contrary to months or years in other countries where legal organ donations take place.
Four methods of forced organ harvesting are known: killing prisoners by removing organs; harvesting from prisoners after lethal injection; harvesting from prisoners who were not completely dead after execution by shooting; and “organ harvesting under the pretext of brain death,” according to the press release.
“It is no longer acceptable for Governments, medical bodies and leading human rights organizations to say there is not enough evidence. The enormous task of assessing all available evidence has now been completed and is available for all to see,” said Susie Hughes, executive director and co-founder of the advocacy group, International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), in the press release.
Hughes added: “The time for ignoring the issue has passed…they are crimes against ALL of humanity. The next step is for humanity to act.”
The report described forced organ harvesting as the “greatest possible breach of a person’s human rights.”
The onus is now on governments to take action against the Chinese regime, the tribunal said.
“It [the report] confirms how all people or organizations interacting in any substantial way with the PRC [People’s Republic of China] should recognize that they are interacting with a criminal state,” Nice said in the press release.
Such people and countries have a “duty” to protect “the right to life,” he added. “This cannot be done by wilful blindness or deafness, pragmatic silence, and inactivity.”
Chinese Officials
One piece of evidence presented in the report directly implicated former regime leader Jiang, who gave direct orders to harvest organs from Falun Gong adherents.
Bai Shuzhong, former minister of health for China’s military, said that “Jiang issued the order [to take organs],” when he was questioned by an investigator during an undercover phone call in 2014.
Another evidence of officials’ direct involvement in forced organ harvesting was revealed during an undercover phone call with Zhu Jiabin, who was the head of the 610 Office in Mudanjiang, a city in China’s northern province of Heilongjiang, in 2016.
The 610 Office is a Gestapo-like secret police force that was established expressly to carry out the persecution of Falun Gong adherents.
“I am called the butcher specializing in live organ harvesting … It’s nothing, just like slaughtering pigs,” Zhu said in the phone call, before adding, “after scooping the organs out, I would sell them.”
According to the press release, all phone calls submitted to the China Tribunal and included within the report have been “individually validated by independent investigators to ensure credibility or origin and content.”
The tribunal also said it is “convinced that official Chinese transplantation statistics have been falsified,” the report stated, in order to cover up forced organ harvesting.
In 2015, the Chinese regime said it would stop sourcing organs from executed prisoners, and exclusively rely on a newly set-up voluntary donation system.
In November last year, a study published in the scientific journal BMC Medical Ethics found that “Beijing’s reported organ donation numbers don’t stack up and there is highly compelling evidence that they are being falsified.”
The study showed that official Chinese figures did not appear to be real data from donations but data generated using a mathematical equation.
From The Epoch Times
