If you go to China for an organ transplant, there's a pretty good chance the organ you receive will have been stolen from a non-consenting Falun Gong practitioner.
This is the message former Edmonton MP David Kilgour imparted during a forum on China's illicit organ harvesting and transplant tourism industry held last Thursday in Edmonton.
"Everybody is told that their organs come from executed prisoners, and that is right," Kilgour said, "Some of them are really convicted murderers, and a lot of them are Falun Gong practitioners who've never been convicted of anything, except to live by Truth, Compassion, and Forbearance."
Falun Gong, a form of meditation and exercise introduced in China in 1992, has an estimated 100 million practitioners worldwide. The spiritual practice was outlawed by the Chinese Communist Party in 1999, and Falun Gong practitioners became targets of persecution, resulting in many thousands being incarcerated in prisons, forced labour camps, and brainwashing centres.
In a report released last summer, Kilgour and Winnipeg-based international human rights lawyer David Matas, who also spoke at the forum, concluded that the organs of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience in China are being harvested for profit.
"We believe that there has been and continues today to be large scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners," said the report.
Kilgour, who along with Matas has traveled to over twenty countries to present the contents of their joint report, said an updated version containing new evidence will be released next week in Ottawa. The report is now available in 18 languages.
Kilgour explained that the organ transplant business in China is far more sophisticated than in most countries where illegal transplanting is carried out, since in China it is the ruling communist party who takes organs by force.
Although a law against the harvesting of organs from un-consenting donors was passed five days before the report was released last June, Matas pointed out that the so-called legal system in China is "heavily politicized," with the whole system being run by and for the communist party.
"The notion that you can possibly have a legal system that's going to be effective… as long as you have one party communist rule in china, the only way that's going to happen is if china becomes a country subject to the rule of law, rather than subject to the rule of the communist party."
While addressing the question of how to put into practice lessons learned from history, Matas said there's a need to guard against preventing new technology from getting into the hands of "greedy and malicious" people.
"New technology increases capacity for good, but it also increases the capacity for evil, and that is certainly true of organ transplant technology," said Matas.
Matas also referred to a court hearing regarding hate incitement by Chinese consulate officials against Falun Gong which he had attended earlier that day. He said inciting hatred should be taken seriously and have serious consequences.
On Thursday morning, Matas and his colleague, Shirish Chotolia, contested the Attorney General of Alberta's earlier decision to drop a charge of hate incitement against Chinese consular officials who had distributed anti-Falun Gong materials to attendees of a conference in Edmonton in June 2004.
The case has been identified by an official from the Hate Crimes Unit of the Edmonton Police as constituting a breach of the hate crime law which bans "the 'willful promotion of hatred' against an 'identifiable group;'" however, the case has not received Alberta's Attorney General consent to proceed.
The judge is expected to make a decision in the coming months after reviewing the case.
"Regardless of his [the judge's] decision, I say practically we have to learn the lesson that these sorts of statements cannot be ignored, and we have to do something about them," Matas said at the forum.
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