UK Lawmaker Seeks Disclosure of Medical Research Ties With China Amid Organ Harvesting Concerns

Crossbench peer Lord David Alton speaks to NTD's 'British Thought Leaders' programme in London, England, on Nov. 22, 2022. Screenshot via The Epoch Times

A British lawmaker wants the UK government to disclose if any government-funded universities in the nation are collaborating with Chinese peers on organ transplant research, in the latest efforts to combat China’s state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting.

The formal request from Lord David Alton of Liverpool, tabled on May 9, came less than a week after a group of U.S. lawmakers wrote a letter urging the Biden administration to seek firsthand evidence to help bring accountability to those responsible for forced organ harvesting in China.

Citing that letter on social media platform X, Lord Alton said he had requested details of medical research conducted by British universities that received funding from the government in collaboration with their Chinese counterparts. Specifically, he wanted to know whether any of the research was related to organ transplants.

Evidence of the gruesome practice has mounted since The Epoch Times first broke the news in the early 2000s that the Chinese regime was forcibly harvesting the organs from detained prisoners of conscience.

That allegation was confirmed in 2019 when the London-based China Tribunal, after a year-long independent investigation, concluded that forced organ harvesting had been taking place in China for years “on a significant scale.”

The main victims, the tribunal found, were imprisoned practitioners of Falun Gong, a meditative discipline that has been subjected to a sweeping persecution campaign by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.

The China Tribunal’s final judgment, released in March 2020 and including 300 pages of witness testimony and submissions, found no evidence that the regime had stopped these grisly crimes.

Earlier this month, a group of U.S. lawmakers wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding that the Biden administration seek first-hand evidence of forced organ harvesting, by offering rewards for information through the State Department.

“Forced organ harvesting is an atrocity and the disruption and deterrence of this practice should be a priority of the State Department,” the group, including U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), wrote in the letter.

“Getting the PRC to account and fully address evidence of forced organ harvesting will be critical in ending this horrific practice and promoting, long term, the establishment of a truly voluntary organ donation system,” the lawmakers wrote, using the acronym of China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.

Their request came amid growing efforts by lawmakers in the United States, the European Union, and other countries to prevent their residents from engaging in “organ tourism” to China and becoming complicit in the crime.

Chinese hospitals attract foreign patients by offering matched organs in as little as a few days—something unheard of in any country relying on a voluntary donation system.

In the United States, three states have enacted laws to help ensure their residents aren’t unknowingly complicit in the regime’s transplant abuses. Arizona lawmakers are pushing for the passage of similar legislation.

The bipartisan Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, which seeks to punish enablers of organ transplant crimes, passed overwhelmingly in the House in March 2023.

Falun Gong practitioners raise awareness of the state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting taking place in China, in the World Falun Dafa parade in New York City on May 13, 2016. Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times

The European Parliament passed a resolution in 2022 condemning the “persistent, systematic, inhumane” forced organ harvesting in China. A separate resolution, passed in January, called on the European Union and its member states to “publicly condemn organ transplant abuses in China,” while demanding that Beijing end the brutal campaign against Falun Gong immediately.

In the UK, the House of Commons in 2022 adopted an amendment to its bioethics law aimed at stopping British patients on an organ waitlist from going to China for transplants.

Concern over Beijing’s forced organ harvesting has prompted the U.S.-based International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation to stop accepting organ transplantation research from China.

A group of medical professionals and advocates, led by British transplant physician Dr. Adnan Sharif, has called on global transplantation societies to follow the lead of the U.S. transplantation nonprofit.

“While [the] international exchange of knowledge, skills and expertise has been a valued hallmark of organ donation and transplantation, collaboration with a transplant program stained with credible evidence of unethical transplant practice that [amounts] to crimes against humanity in relation to organ donor sources,” they wrote in an article published in The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation in 2022.

Eva Fu contributed to this report.