A new petition demands the US government take a stand against an atrocity: It asks the White House to investigate and condemn the Chinese regime’s gruesome practice of systematically harvesting the organs of practitioners of Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual discipline.
The petition was launched on the White House’s We the People website on Dec. 2, calling on the United States government to “Investigate and publicly condemn organ harvesting from Falun Gong believers in China.“
If it gets 25,000 supporters by Jan. 1 next year, the administration is obligated to respond, something it has yet to do so far.
The subject has been a sensitive one for the administration, according to experts, because of the seriousness of the allegations—live organ harvesting of captive and innocent spiritual believers—alongside the U.S. government’s wish not to rock the boat with relations with the People’s Republic of China, which, among other things, holds a sizable amount of U.S. debt.
But initiators of the petition think it vital that the United States responds. “If there’s any government in the world that will have some impact on Chinese human rights it’s going to be the United States,” said Dr. Alejandro Centurion, a board member of the medical advocacy group Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting.
“If our government does speak out, it would be a huge step to further expose these crimes and bring them to an end,” Centurion said. The petition says that the government has a “moral obligation to expose these crimes.”
A body of evidence around the Falun Gong and other political and religious prisoners has been accumulating since 2006, and has over the last year begun to gain more public traction, with congressional hearings and mentions—there was a time when the allegations were not even mentioned—in official U.S. reports.
“Like many other Americans and citizens around the world, we are very concerned about one of the most horrifying crimes against humanity of our time: Forced organ harvesting from living ‘prisoners’ in China,” says a note sent to the press by the petition initiators. “This barbaric practice has been taking place in China for over a decade.”
