WASHINGTON—Lawmakers leading a congressional panel on China are calling for the State Department to set up a whistleblower reward program seeking firsthand evidence to help hold perpetrators of Beijing’s forced organ harvesting accountable.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), chair and co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, will write to Secretary of State Antony Blinken requesting that funds be set aside for disrupting and deterring the Chinese regime’s lucrative state-sponsored abuse, according to a letter The Epoch Times viewed before its release.
The State Department’s War Crimes Rewards Program offers up to $5 million to individuals offering insights that result in the arrest, transfer, or conviction of foreign nationals accused of crimes against humanity, genocide, or war crimes.
Other State Department programs include Rewards for Justice, which seeks information that “protects American lives and furthers U.S. national security objectives,” and the Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program, which covers transnational crimes such as human trafficking.
Mr. Smith suggests that a reward program addressing the issue of forced organ harvesting would help the State Department’s initiative to counter crimes against humanity and human trafficking.
“Whistleblowers and men and women who become truth-tellers against dictatorships are absolutely worth their weight in gold,” Mr. Smith told The Epoch Times, “because then we get the inside story about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it. We’ll do it with anonymity to protect them.”
The layer of protection is “absolutely important,” he said, especially if the whistleblowers have family and friends within China’s borders.
“If they want to come and testify, I would welcome them any day of the week”—but only if doing so doesn’t trigger a retaliatory mechanism under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he said.
“[The CCP will] kill their parents, they'll kill their sister—that’s how they do it—or put them in jail and torture [them],” he said of the CCP’s retaliation methods.
The EU Parliament members “consider that the practice of organ harvesting from living prisoners on death row and prisoners of conscience in China may amount to crimes against humanity,” the EU Parliament said in a statement at the time.
“It is vital that we expose and end the CCP’s forced organ harvesting scheme,” she told The Epoch Times. “The CCP has created a sophisticated industry by preying on the most vulnerable populations in China. Human rights experts estimate that 60,000 to 100,000 forced organ transplants are occurring annually in China. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
It’s “very, very important that the whole world knows exactly what the CCP has been doing to these minority communities,” Ms. Steel said at the hearing.
These are “innocent people’s organs—we really have to stop [this abuse].”
Mr. Smith while at the hearing invited his colleagues to join him in signing the letter to Mr. Blinken requesting funds for the proposed reward program.
“Silence is unacceptable,” he said. “Silence is not an option, particularly from medical associations and corporations. They remain silent, they are the most at risk of complicity in this heinous crime against humanity.”
“This is an ongoing fight to demand transparency and justice,” he said. “If we don’t act now, many more lives will be lost.”
