Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) chair Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) speaks during a press conference discussing the implications of the Safeguarding National Security Bill (Article 23 legislation) at the House Triangle near the U.S. Capitol building in Washington on March 22, 2024. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)
A congressional committee is calling on lawmakers to pass legislation that would punish the Chinese regime for its horrific practice of forced organ harvesting.
The bicameral Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) released its 2023 annual report on human rights conditions in China on May 10. The report covered a wide range of topics related to Beijing’s human rights violations and offered a list of recommendations to Congress and the Biden administration.
One recommendation for Congress is to pass the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act. The House version of the legislation (H.R.1154) passed by a vote of 413–2 in March 2023, while the Senate version (S.761) has yet to advance out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since it was introduced in 2023. CECC Chairman Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) was the principal sponsor of the House bill.
“Congress should pass the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act ... to impose sanctions and other penalties for anyone involved in human trafficking for the purpose of organ removal and expand annual reporting by the State Department on the practice in China and worldwide,” the report reads.
China’s transplant industry is a state-organized transplant market using organs obtained by killing prisoners of conscience. In 2019, the China Tribunal, an independent people’s tribunal in London, concluded that the Chinese regime had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years “on a substantial scale,” with Falun Gong practitioners being the “principal source” of human organs.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that incorporates meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
The practice became enormously popular after it was introduced in 1992, with at least 70 million practitioners by the late 1990s, according to official estimates at the time. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), considering that popularity a threat, began a brutal campaign to eliminate the practice in July 1999.
Millions of practitioners have since been illegally detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
The CECC report also asked the Biden administration to work with allies and partners on the issue.
“The Administration should organize allies and partners at the U.N. Human Rights Council to support the concerns raised by the PRC’s ‘organ harvesting’ practices by U.N. human rights experts and seek independent oversight of the PRC organ transplantation system,” the report reads, using the abbreviation of communist China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.
In 2021, a dozen human rights experts, including special rapporteurs to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said they were “extremely alarmed by reports of alleged ‘organ harvesting’ targeting minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims, and Christians, in detention in China.” The experts called on China to “allow independent monitoring by international human rights mechanisms.”
The CECC has a political prisoner database (PPD) on its website. According to the report, the database documents the unjust imprisonment of 10,889 prisoners of conscience; among them, 2,615 were in detention as of June 30, 2023.
“The cases documented in the PPD are reflective of broad trends of government repression, though the total number of political prisoners in detention is much larger,” the report reads.
Zhou Deyong in Monument Valley in Navajo County, Ariz., in January 2020. (Courtesy of Zhou You)
The report highlighted the cases of Niu Xiaona and Zhou Deyong, two detained Falun Gong practitioners currently listed in the PPD.
Ms. Niu, a severely disabled woman from northern China’s Heilongjiang Province, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for her belief in September 2022, according to Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that tracks the persecution campaign. Mr. Zhou, a geological engineer, was handed an eight-year jail term in April 2023, following two years of detention.
Earlier this month, six lawmakers on the CECC, including Mr. Smith, sent a letter asking U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to use his department’s rewards program to obtain information that will help to bring accountability to those individuals who are engaged in forced organ harvesting in China.
U.S.-based advocacy group Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) issued a statement on X applauding the CECC for taking a “monumental stance” with its letter to Mr. Blinken.
“Removing a person’s organs without consent is a crime that has no place in our world today,” DAFOH wrote.
Frank Fang is a Taiwan-based journalist. He covers U.S., China, and Taiwan news. He holds a master's degree in materials science from Tsinghua University in Taiwan.
