WASHINGTON—China’s state-sponsored forced organ harvesting continues to be a concern for the United States, a State Department official told reporters on March 20.
Erin Barclay, the State Department’s acting assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, said she’s aware of the congressional legislative proposal, and pointed to a section in the department’s newly released human rights report highlighting the issue.
“We will continue to focus on that as an issue on a broad spectrum of human rights and trafficking issues going forward where it comes up,” she said, in response to a question from The Epoch Times at a March press briefing accompanying the release of the report.
“The human rights situation in China is something that we are regularly raising with partner states bilaterally and in multilateral settings where China is present,” Barclay said later in the briefing.
“The authors analyzed 2,838 papers from Chinese-language transplant publications and found in 71 cases that the cause of death was the organ transplant itself, carried out before doctors had made a legitimate determination of brain death.”
“They have procured organs from people who are not proclaimed dead, meaning they became the executioners,” he said.
Human rights defenders attempting to lend legal assistance to persecution victims also have faced increased retribution.
Among the political prisoners identified in the human rights report was Falun Gong adherent Bian Lichao, a former middle school teacher from northern China’s Hebei Province who was sentenced in 2012 to 13 years in prison. His wife, who didn’t practice Falun Gong, was jailed for publicizing details of authorities’ persecution of their family, and died in 2020 while in prison as a result of abdominal fluid buildup, according to Minghui.org, a U.S.-website that serves as a clearinghouse for the persecution cases.
Their daughter was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison after unfurling a banner that read “I want to see my father,” Minghui reported. She was 23 at the time of her arrest in March 2014.