What’s Next After MPs Unanimously Pass Bill to Combat Forced Organ Harvesting?

Falun Gong practitioners participate in a parade to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the April 25th peaceful appeal of 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners in Beijing, in Flushing, N.Y., on April 23, 2022. Larry Dye/The Epoch Times

Now that Parliament has passed Canada’s version of legislation to combat international forced organ harvesting and trafficking, some of the key people involved in the cause explain what will happen next.

Bill S-223, introduced by Sen. Salma Ataullahjan, passed in the House of Commons on Dec. 14 with unanimous support from MPs across party lines.

At a reception after the bill passed to celebrate the historic win which took nearly 15 years of legislative efforts, Conservative MP Garnett Genuis, sponsor of the bill in the House, talked about next steps.

“We need to continue to do the work to ensure effective enforcement, work with provinces on disclosure and reporting, so that we’ll be able to identify cases of organ harvesting and trafficking,” he told The Epoch Times.

“This is a great day, an exciting step forward, and I hope that every country around the world will pass this kind of legislation so that we'll be able to finally put a stop to this practice.“

Conservative MPs Garnett Genuis (front, 3rd R) and Arnold Viersen (back, 4th R) poses with Falun Gong adherents as they gathered at a reception held in the Wellington Building on Parliament Hill to celebrate the passing of Bill S-223, on Dec. 14, 2022. Limin Zhou/The Epoch Times

Bill S-223 will make it a criminal offence for a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident to go abroad to receive an organ taken from someone who did not give informed consent to the organ’s removal.

It will also amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to deny permanent residents or foreign nationals access to Canada if they have engaged in activities relating to the trafficking of human organs.

The bill, introduced last November, currently does not have a provision that mandates health professionals to report to government officials should their patients opt for transplant tourism that may result in receiving organs obtained by illicit means.

“The next step is to look at reporting,” Genuis said. “That may require some dialogue between the federal [and] provincial governments around that, but now that this bill is passed, given what the law now says, it’s an opening for governments to look at how they can ensure the law is enforced.”

“But even without mandatory reporting, I think it’s a significant and positive step. People can still be prosecuted for it, and it has a powerful deterrence effect as well,” he added.

Mandatory Reporting

The first iteration of the bill was introduced in 2008, but it died when Parliament was dissolved. Many similar bills were introduced since then but they met the same fate when the particular parliamentary session ended either due to election or prorogation.

The original version of Ataullahjan’s bill, S-240, tabled in October 2017, did not include a provision on mandatory reporting, but it was introduced at the initiative of the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights through its “Twelfth Report” in June 2018.

“A medical practitioner as defined in section 241.1 who treats a person in relation to an organ transplant must, as soon as reasonably practicable, report to the authority designated by order of the Governor in Council for that purpose the name of that person, if known, and the fact that the person has received an organ transplant,” the report said.

However, the initiative was halted when former Liberal MP Raj Saini moved an amendment in the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development (FAAE) in February 2019 favouring the removal of the duty to report on the grounds that it would violate doctor-patient confidentiality and encroach upon provincial and territorial health jurisdiction, among other reasons. The amendment passed with a 5-4 vote.

Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas testifies at a U.S. Congressional hearing on forced organ harvesting, in this file photo. Lisa Fan/The Epoch Times

Winnipeg-based human rights lawyer David Matas, who has long researched the Chinese regime’s forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience, said mandatory reporting could be legislated provincially for Bill S-223 to combat transplant tourism effectively.

“To make the legislation work, the provinces would need to require reporting by health practitioners to relevant authorities of transplant tourism,” Matas said in an email on Dec. 13.

“Transplant tourists on return need anti-rejection drugs and are therefore known to the health practitioners. Unless reporting of their buying organs abroad is required, patient health practitioner confidentiality prevents health practitioners from passing on the information.”

‘More Steps Required’

In 2006, Matas and the late former MP and cabinet minister David Kilgour released the ground-breaking report “Bloody Harvest”—later followed by a book of the same name in 2009—which concluded that the Chinese communist Party (CCP) was implicit in forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners on a large scale, killing them in the process, to sell their body parts for profit.

Falun Gong is a meditation and spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Under the rule of then-leader Jiang Zemin, the CCP launched a far-reaching campaign of persecution against the practice in 1999, which continues to this day.

In 2016, Matas, Kilgour, and investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann jointly published a 680-page report on forced organ harvesting in China. They estimated that Chinese hospitals performed 60,000 to 100,000 transplant surgeries on a yearly basis, and that the chief source of the organs was Falun Gong practitioners.

In his remarks to the Canadian Transplant Summit Kidney Working Group in Alberta in October 2019, Matas said “there should be subsequent legislation to enact mandatory reporting” should a bill like S-240—without the provision—be passed.

“Patients should not be immune from liability, although considerations which should apply to their liability would be different from those which should apply to the liability of others. Prosecutorial discretion should be sufficient to prevent inappropriate prosecution of patients,” he said.

During the first debate on Bill S-223’s third reading in Parliament on Dec. 5, Genuis said the bill is about “cutting off” the demand for harvested organs and “in some sense punish” those involved in forced organ harvesting and trafficking, though more still needs to be done.

“This bill is an important step. There are still many more steps required, but it is an important step in trying to advance justice for [the victims],” he said.

Conservative MP Arnold Viersen, vice-chair of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the FAAE, said Bill S-223 will probably receive royal assent in February 2023.

“That’ll be when it gets declared into law, and then at that point the police will be able to investigate people that are participating in organ harvesting,” he told The Epoch Times at the reception on Dec. 14.

“And it also puts China, the Chinese Communist Party, on notice that we know what’s going on and we are passing laws in Canada to recognize that.”

Donna Ho and Limin Zhou contributed to this report.