Horror Stories Emerge of Alleged State-Sanctioned Organ Harvesting in China
Amid tensions between the NBA and China that highlighted the difference between the values of a free West and an authoritarian state, come reports of forced organ harvesting on people sentenced to Chinese prison and labor camps.
According to Hamid Sabi, counsel to the China Tribunal, an independent panel set up to examine the issue, the harvesting has involved “hundreds of thousands of victims,” Reuters reported.
Members of the Falun Gong faith and China’s Muslim Uighur population are among the top groups targeted, he said.
“Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” Sabi said.
“Organ transplantation to save life is a scientific and social triumph. But killing the donor is criminal.”
The tribunal has said with “certainty” that “in China, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time,” Fox News reported.
“Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years, and Falun Gong practitioners have been one — and probably the main — source of organ supply,” the report concluded, saying China’s transplant industry tops $1 billion.
“China later claimed that death row prisoners consented to donate their organs to the State to redeem themselves for the crimes they had committed against the State, a practice China claimed to have stopped in January 2015,” the Tribunal said in its report.
“However, the explosion of organ transplant activities in China from 2000, together with reports of thousands of transplant tourists going to China to purchase organs, suggests a larger supply of organs than could be sourced from executed criminals alone,”
“The scale of the Chinese transplant industry, together with other evidence, points to the possibility that China is involved in forced organ harvesting and selling for profit organs from prisoners of conscience,” the report said.
The China Organ Harvest Research Center called the organ harvesting in its latest report “a crime against humanity and a new form of state terrorism.”
Testimony shared with Fox News focused on individual cases, such as a woman named Han Yu who relayed what she saw when she went to see her father after he died in prison.
“I saw obvious injuries on his face, even after the makeup, the severe bruise below his left eye stood out. There was a trace of stitches starting from the throat down to where his clothes covered. I tried to unbutton the clothes, the police saw and quickly dragged me out,” Yu said. “Later another family member went in and continued to unbutton and found stitches that went all the way to the stomach.”
“We were not even allowed to cry when he was buried. After I heard about organ harvesting, I couldn’t imagine what had happened to my father before his death. It happened, and it is happening,” she said.
A woman named Jiang Li said China does not always wait for victims to die, recalling a 2009 visit to her father, who was in a forced labor camp at the time.
“His mental and physical health was normal. Then at 3.40 p.m. the next day, the labor camp called my brother and said he had died and immediately hung up,” she said. “Seven of my family members arrived at the mortuary house at 10.30 p.m. with the guidance of police officers. They read out the regulations — we could see the body for only five minutes, no cameras or communication devices, and we could only go to the freezer room to see Jiang’s head and not his whole body.”
“We pulled out my father’s body halfway. We touched his chest, and it was warm. He was wearing a down jacket. My older sister prepared to perform CPR,” she said.
“But were each forcibly dragged out of the freezer by four people. Uniformed and plainclothes officers pushed my father’s body into the freezer. They demanded that we quickly sign for cremation and pay the fees.”
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