A group of UK lawmakers, lawyers, and victims of China’s persecution gathered for a hearing in London on Nov. 5, raising 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, discussed at the event that 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,” Stephenson said.
Speaking to NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet, after the event, Stephenson said the issue of complicity also comes in the form of Western journals accepting Chinese researchers’ transplant-related papers that cannot answer the vital question of how organs are 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.
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.”
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 last 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. The practice became popular in China by the late 1990s, with more than 70 million practitioners, according to official estimates at the time.
The popularity was deemed a threat by the CCP, which launched a sweeping campaign against the practice in July 1999. Since then, millions of Falun Gong practitioners have been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
The tribunal found that medical tests conducted on Falun Gong and Uyghur prisoners of conscience—but not done 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 take 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.
Recommendations
At the Nov. 5 hearing, David Matas, a Canadian investigative lawyer, offered 12 different recommendations on what the UK can do to avoid complicity with the CCP’s forced organ harvesting.“The point I made is that when it comes to avoiding complicity, that’s totally within the power of the United Kingdom, they don’t need the agreement of China to do any of it,” Matas told NTD.
One recommendation is for the UK government to ban entry for anyone involved in organ transplant abuse abroad, according to his prepared remarks.
Matas said the UK Parliament should expand the scope of its current legislation, allowing prosecution against not only British nationals but also visitors from China who have been involved in forced organ harvesting.
Another suggestion calls for transplant-related collaborations between China and the UK to end. For instance, Matas said, UK 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 its practice of forced organ harvesting.
“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. So there’s lots that the UK government can do that it hasn’t been doing today,” Matas said.
To prevent complicity, 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 come up with legislation similar to the Falun Gong Protection Act in the United States.
