Campaigners Call for End of Transplant Collaborations With China Over Forced Organ Harvesting

Falun Dafa practitioners hold signs highlighting the practice of forced organ harvesting in China, in a parade in Manhattan, New York City, on May 16, 2019. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Countries should adopt laws to stop any organ transplant collaborations with China, campaigners said in the Hague on Tuesday.

The remarks were made on Human Rights Day at a conference highlighting the Chinese regime’s ongoing forced organ harvesting from living practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual group, the Uyghur people, and others.

Speaking during a panel discussion at the event, Kayan Wong, spokesperson for the Falun Gong community in the Netherlands, said she hopes the Dutch Parliament will pass legislation similar to the U.S. Falun Gong Protection Act.

The bill, which passed the House of Representatives in June, aims to counter forced organ harvesting in China by sanctioning perpetrators and stopping the United States from working with China in the field of organ transplantation.

Panelist Andreas Weber, a medical doctor and European deputy director of human rights watchdog Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH), said the legislation is a “very balanced” and “very intelligent” response to the human rights atrocity.

He called for the immediate halt to any research collaboration and business with China in the transplant field “until independent investigations have been conducted” on allegations of forced organ harvesting in China.

The event, co-hosted by DAFOH and Hague-based Global Human Rights Defence, will be the first of several in Europe, according to moderator Dhir H. van Bommel, former member of the Dutch Parliament and former member of the Socialist Party.

Falun Gong: Main Victim Group

Forced organ harvesting in China is the state-sanctioned extracting of organs by force, mostly from prisoners of conscience, for transplantation purposes.

While witness testimonies suggest the practice of forced organ harvesting has existed in China as early as the 1990s, its scale ballooned after the turn of the century, correlating with the regime’s persecution of Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, a religious faith based on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.

First introduced to the public in 1992 in China under the communist regime, Falun Gong has been taught as a traditional qigong practice, which includes meditative exercises and the cultivation of one’s moral character. Its health benefits initially earned the praise of state-run media outlets.

As the practice grew in popularity, with an official estimate of 70 million practitioners, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began to perceive the spiritual movement as a threat. Investigators and campaigners say that the mass incarceration of Falun Gong practitioners since 1999, as well as their healthy lifestyle, made them a perfect “donor” pool for what was soon to be the CCP’s billion-dollar on-demand transplant industry.

In 2019, the London-based independent China Tribunal, chaired by prominent judge and barrister Geoffrey Nice, concluded that the Chinese regime had committed torture and crimes against humanity through state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience. The tribunal found that the victims were mainly Falun Gong practitioners and that the practice had been carried out on a significant scale.

In March 2020, the tribunal said in its final judgement, which was released along with 300 pages of witness testimony and submissions, that there was “no evidence of the practice having been stopped.”

Since then, investigators have also found evidence that the Uyghur people and other ethnic minority groups have fallen victim to organ harvesting.

Several legislatures have taken steps to stop their citizens from traveling to China to receive organ transplants.

In March 2023, the U.S. House also passed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act. If the bill becomes law, the government will be required to produce annual reports on forced organ harvesting in foreign countries, and anyone found to be involved would face a civil penalty of up to $250,000 and a criminal penalty of up to $1 million and 20 years in prison.

In 2022, the UK passed legislation banning residents from buying, selling, or facilitating transactions of human organs anywhere in the world.

Cold Genocide

Presenting DAFOH’s 2024 report before the panel discussion on Tuesday, Weber said evidence shows that the killing of Falun Gong practitioners by forced organ harvesting has continued “unabated for the past 25 years.”

He described the human rights atrocity as a cold genocide, in which the CCP attempts to eradicate Falun Gong with “a genocide that remains unnoticed and moves on slowly, achieving the goal of destroying a religious group over 25 years or more.”

Calling for a halt of all collaboration with China’s organ transplant industry, Weber said such mass-execution by medical professionals means that China’s transplant market has been “built on the blood and bodies of unjustly persecuted Falun Gong practitioners.”