UK Must Avoid Complicity in CCP’s Forced Organ Harvesting, Says Rights Panel

Falun Gong practitioners hold rally marking the 24th anniversary of the CCP's persecution, in London on July 15, 2023. Yanning Qi/The Epoch Times

A group of UK lawmakers, lawyers, and victims of persecution by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gathered for a hearing in London on Nov. 5, to raise awareness of how Western medical society could inadvertently contribute to the Chinese regime’s practice of forced organ harvesting.

Eleanor Stephenson, a barrister and legal consultant for the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, said medical professionals could be complicit in communist China’s crimes if they provide clinical training to Chinese transplant surgeons, who are likely to be involved with forced organ harvesting.

“A defendant does not need to have knowledge of the precise crime that will be committed,” she said at the hearing.

Stephenson told NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet, that Western medical journals may also be complicit, by accepting transplant-related papers from Chinese researchers who cannot answer the vital question of how the organs were sourced—meaning there is no proof of voluntary consent from organ donors.

“We need political will by the UK government to help us find out about the collaborations between Western medical entities and the professionals that work in them, to try and find out what training is being done, what journals are accepting research, to find out what drugs are being supplied,” she said.

She noted that there was a failed effort to bring an amendment on the issue to the UK government’s procurement bill in 2023. The amendment would have barred suppliers found to be involved in forced organ harvesting from obtaining public contracts.

Stephenson expressed concern about hospital exchange programs, as Chinese hospitals send their trainees to Western hospitals.

“So the hospital exchange programs need to do their due diligence to see where these trainees are coming from; otherwise, there’s a risk that they could be legally complicit in forced organ harvesting,” she said. “Are [the trainees] coming from a hospital that is known to perform forced organ harvesting operations?

“Or, if it’s not known that they do forced organ harvesting operations, are there other indicators that they are performing operations, such as advertising organs with predetermined waiting times? That’s not possible in a normal circumstance.”

For years, China has long been an attractive destination for transplant tourists, given that Chinese hospitals can offer unusually short waiting times for matching organs. This phenomenon is made possible because the regime uses prisoners of conscience as a living organ bank, according to investigative reports and The Epoch Times’ previous reporting.

Falun Gong

During the event, Lord David Alton of Liverpool said that many victims of organ harvesting in China have been Falun Gong practitioners, who have been targeted by the regime’s “sickening persecution” for the past 25 years.

“To date, over 5,000 documented cases of Falun Gong practitioners dying due to persecution have been reported,” he said. “But in a country where prisoners of conscience have their organs forcibly harvested and then, their remains incinerated to destroy all evidence—this can only be the very tip of the iceberg, we have no idea how many undocumented deaths there have may been.

“No one should have to face imprisonment, torture nor butchery because of their religious or spiritual beliefs.”

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that incorporates gentle meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Introduced to the public in 1992, Falun Gong quickly gained popularity in China, with more than 70 million people taking up the practice by 1999, according to official estimates at the time.

The CCP deemed this popularity a threat and launched a sweeping campaign against Falun Gong in July 1999. Since then, millions of practitioners have been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands being tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.

In 2006, the first eyewitnesses came forward with evidence that the Chinese regime was harvesting prisoners’ organs while they were still alive. In 2019. the CCP’s crimes were confirmed by the China Tribunal, an independent people’s tribunal in London, after an 18-month investigation. The tribunal found, “beyond reasonable doubt,” that the Chinese regime had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for many years, with the primary victims being Falun Gong practitioners.

The tribunal found that medical tests conducted on Falun Gong and Uyghur prisoners of conscience—yet not on other prisoners—were “highly suggestive of methods used to assess organ function.”

Two Chinese Falun Gong practitioners—who were both imprisoned due to their faith—shared at the event how they nearly became victims of forced organ harvesting.

Tian Xin, who arrived in the UK in January to claim asylum, said he endured a decade of persecution, having spent time in different prisons over the years.

During his imprisonment, Tian said, he was subjected to different forms of torture, including electrical shock and slave labor. He also recalled that he and other imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners were forced to undergo X-rays and blood tests.

Tian suspected he was not killed because his organs were not compatible with any patients awaiting transplant surgery at the time.

Han Fei, who arrived in the UK in 2023, said that she underwent a CT scan, ultrasound, and blood tests while she was detained in Beijing.

She recounted an incident in which a policeman held her down and almost strangled her as a female doctor drew her blood.

Recommendations

At the Nov. 5 hearing, Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas offered 12 recommendations for how the UK can avoid complicity with the CCP’s forced organ harvesting.

“Avoiding complicity [is] totally within the power of the United Kingdom,” Matas told NTD.

One recommendation is for the UK government to ban entry for anyone involved in organ transplant abuses abroad. Matas said the UK Parliament should expand the scope of its current legislation, allowing the prosecution of not only British nationals but also visitors from China who have been involved in forced organ harvesting.

Another suggestion calls for an end to transplant-related collaborations between China and the UK. For example, Matas said, British health professionals should not provide training to doctors or nurses to engage in transplantation in China, and they should not travel to China for transplantation conferences.

Matas also proposed that the UK amend its State Immunity Act so that perpetrators won’t be able to claim state immunity when they are prosecuted in the UK for their crimes or face civil lawsuits by representatives of victims.

Separately, Matas also offered four different recommendations on what the UK can do to get China to abandon the grisly practice.

“I think the UK can recommence human rights dialogues. They can make statements in the U.N. Human Rights Council. They could raise the matter in the Security Council. They could raise the matter in [the] U.N. General Assembly,” Matas said. “So there’s lots that the UK government can do that it hasn’t been doing today.”

The hearing also cited a recent report on the state of the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China and the UK by the UK Falun Dafa Association.

The report suggests that the UK government impose “effective and targeted Magnitsky-style sanctions” on Chinese officials responsible for human rights abuses against Falun Gong practitioners; ban British companies from supplying organ transplantation equipment, devices, or immunosuppressant drugs to China; and propose legislation similar to the Falun Gong Protection Act in the United States.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Falun Gong Protection Act in June. If enacted, the legislation will require the United States to avoid any cooperation with China in the organ transplantation field and to deploy targeted sanctions and visa restrictions to address the persecution of Falun Gong.