Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()
Subscribe: Android | RSS | More
Communist China appears to be continuing its decades-long dark practice of “harvesting” organs from individuals it imprisons for various “crimes.”
The latest charge comes from a group calling itself the China Tribunal, a “coalition of lawyers, academics, ethicists, medical professionals, researchers, and human rights advocates dedicated to ending forced organ harvesting in China,” according to the group’s website.
Appearing before the UN’s so-called Human Rights Council in late September, the group said it has discovered evidence that China continues the gruesome practice of taking organs from political and religious prisoners, despite Beijing’s insistence that it had halted the atrocities several years ago.
Speaking before the UN body in Geneva, Hamid Sabi, a lawyer for the China Tribunal, testified that “forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, including the religious minorities of Falun Gong and Uighurs, has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale, and it continues today.”
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
The tribunal said that estimates are as high as “hundreds of thousands” of individuals who have been murdered by China for their vital organs. The unconscionable practice amounts to a multi-million-dollar industry for China, which reportedly sells the organs in the lucrative transplant market. “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,” said Sabi.
While Red China has admitted that it once harvested the organs of death-row prisoners for the purpose of transplants, it insists that it halted the practice in 2015 — something the China Tribunal counters as untrue. In fact, the watchdog group says, the number of medical transplants in China has increased dramatically over the past several years, along with an increase in individuals traveling to China to purchase organs.
According to the tribunal, such an increase suggests “a larger supply of organs than could be sourced from executed criminals alone.” The group said that the data, along with first-hand reports from inside the country, has lead to the inescapable conclusion that “prisoners of conscience” — those detained for political or religious beliefs — are being murdered in order to supply organs for China’s burgeoning organ-trafficking industry.
In its 2019 report, the China Tribunal charged that “thousands of innocents have been killed to order having the physical integrity of their beings — their bodies — cut open while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea and skin to be removed and turned into commodities for sale.”
Among those most often detained and used for such purposes, charged the tribunal, are Uighur Muslims, those practicing Falun Gong, and Christians who have been rounded up from illegal underground churches in China.
In its report, the tribunal said that the heartless actions of Communist China are comparable to the “worst atrocities committed in conflicts of the 20th century; but victim for victim and death for death, the gassing of the Jews by the Nazis, the massacre by the Khmer Rouge, or the butchery to death of the Rwanda Tutsis may not be worse than cutting out the hearts, other organs, and the very souls of living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people.”
Image: TwilightShow via iStock / Getty Images Plus
