Canada’s Senate unanimously approved a bill intended to help combat international organ trafficking on May 6. Bill S-204 will now go on to the House of Commons for deliberation by MPs before it can be passed into law.
“This piece of legislation has been the culmination of over 12 years of parliamentary work on the pressing issue of organ trafficking,” Ataullahjan said, referring to previous legislation on the issue in past parliamentary sessions that didn’t get passed into law before those sessions ended due to upcoming elections.
Addressing the Senate to support the legislation, Sen. David Richards said “the time has come to pass this bill.”
“We have often been asked in this world to fight against the darkness that threatens us, to fight the good fight. In this chamber over the last four years, I have seen this happen. I believe that Bill S-204 and Senator Ataullahjan are standard-bearers in such a battle, and I ask for your support,” Richards said.
Bill S-204 makes it illegal for Canadians to get organs abroad without the consent of the donor, and makes people involved in forced organ harvesting inadmissible to Canada.
Testifying before the committee, former MP and secretary of state for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour noted that there is only one country where it’s the government that is involved in forcibly taking organs from prisoners of consciences, and that is China.
The Chinese regime’s state-sanctioned organ harvesting has since expanded to claim other persecuted groups on a large scale, including the Uyghur Muslims, investigators have said.
“It’s high time that Canada joined about 10 other countries that have enacted legislation on this,” Kilgour said.