Former MP David Kilgour (left), and respected human rights lawyer David Matas (right) attend a press conference to release their report concerning allegations of organ harvesting targeting live Falun Gong practitioners. (Chun Zhu/The Epoch Times)

“Am wealthy, ill and looking for a kidney.” The global business for body parts is booming. Especially bizarre – executed prisoners are officially disemboweled in China. At this time, Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, is taking a deep look at this macabre practice. [March 12, 2007]

Mabel Wu did not pay any attention to her medical specialists concerns. This 69-year old lady from Northridge, a quiet suburb in Los Angeles, traveled against her doctor’s advice to the booming South China city Dongguan in Guangzhou Province. She was going to buy a new kidney for $40,000. Soon after her arrival, she was told that the donor of the kidney was a 30-year old man. There were another four patients at the Dongguan hospital, all from Taiwan, who already had a kidney transplant. Wu returned to California after the transplant, happy with the new kidney.

Chinese hospitals gloat without feeling embarrassed about their extravagant services. One reads on the official website of China’s International Organ Transplant Center “If you are inquiring about an organ, please transfer $5,000. It will take no more than a week to find a suitable donor for you most of the time, once we confirm receipt of the funds, and at the most only one month.” The $5,000 is only the down payment. One can expect at least 30,000 Euro for a kidney, 70,000 Euro for a liver and a heart is at 140,000 Euro quite a bit more expensive.

The patients are told under complete secrecy that the organ donors are mostly executed prisoners, who are still alive at the time the recipient arrives in China. At the same time, the Chinese contacts brag about their bizarre practice: “We do not remove organs from humans who are brain dead, because that would affect the condition of the organ.”

Lately, the highest-level Chinese entities confirm that prisons and concentration camps are used to store human parts. Juang Jeifu, the Deputy Health Minister admitted last year, “Besides a very few accident victims, most of the organs come from executed prisoners.” He said that those organ donors have agreed beforehand to be organ donors.

David Matas and David Kilgour are quite certain that this is far from the truth. Matas, a noted Canadian human rights attorney and Kilgour, the former Secretary at the Canadian Foreign ministry, have painstakingly investigated the Chinese organ harvesting practices, and disclosed details in a report that caused quite a stir.

They came up with the following: During the past six years, China’s transplant experience, that did not exists before that time, has taken a lucrative upswing. Most notably, the not transparent transplant business began to boom after the massive repression of Falun Gong adherents – the practitioners of an esoteric cult, which the Chinese officials have called an “evil cult” and persecute cruelly. According to Matas and Kilgour, “several hundreds” of ill people travel to China annually for an organ transplant that they need to survive.

The evidence the two presented is so tight that even the United Nations demands a formal investigation. Manfred Nowak, the human rights lawyer from Vienna and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, gave the Chinese regime a deadline, which expires this week, to come clean concerning the allegations.

The issue is “definitely a case that requires investigation,” as much of the evidence points out that “also humans are executed who had not even been convicted of anything, but who are killed for their organs.” In plain language: Sick people from the U.S., Canada, Saudi Arabia and many other countries are the cause that people in China are executed, people who most likely would never have been executed if there weren’t a demand for organs.

There are many more executions in China than in any other country worldwide. It is not known how many are executed. Official numbers are not available. But a moderate guess is that there are 1,700 executions yearly. There were over 60,000 organ transplants during the past six years. Even, if each candidate for execution would be the donor of more than one organ, the executions would not even come close to the number of actual organ transplants performed over those years. This raises the suspicion that besides the “regular” executions, people are being murdered solely for their organs – to satisfy the market demand.

The reason for this high explosive demand is naturally the shortage of donor organs worldwide – though the demand is in some countries more dramatic than in other countries. Those who are waiting for a heart or an organ, but have to wait in line in his/her home country and might not get one has to rely on the Chinese execution system. Those who need a kidney have quite a selection. In Turkey, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, that is in many poorer or third-world countries one can find enough poor people who will donate for 1,000 Euro (India) or 7,000 Euro (Peru) a kidney for the benefit of a rich organ recipient. After all, the human has two kidneys and can live with just one. But, one has only one heart or one liver.

Vienna, the “Allgemeines Krankenhaus (AKH)” (General Hospital of Vienna), floor seven. Ferdinand Muehlbacher, pioneer and head of AKH’s Transplant Chirurgic Center is talking to us. The wiry 58-year old with the debonair attitude and a full beard chooses his words carefully. His specialty requires the death of one person. Then, this death will save the life of at least one, if not more humans. It is not a surprise that more often than not deep sentimentality, such as worrisome fantasies, deep emotions and deep-seated speculation, play an important role in his surgical branch. Because of that, his medical branch can’t deal with any bad news. “I really am not aware of any case one could document in Austria,” conceded the professor. But, he is also well aware of the rumors that tell patients that their waiting time in Austria could be shortened if they travel to a far away distance.

Muehlbacher knows of the problem because of his international “foreign aid” projects. He said “I had a colleague and a patient in Egypt who went to China for a transplant. It was rumored at the time that they paid $30,000.” Then, he remembers another case in Bosnia, “A young girl lost a kidney. She had received a transplant in India. Everything was terribly inflamed.” Muehlbacher’s colleague Raimund Margreiter, a renowned transplant doctor in Innsbruck [Austria] told him of two Turkish citizens. They received a kidney somewhere in the Orient.” That case blew up because both tried to get reimbursed for their costs by the regional health insurer.

In reality, the pressure to receive an organ from a donor in a foreign country is not that pronounced in Austria. The laws in Austria allow doctors to remove organs from a dead body, unless he/she had a will that forbid such actions (in reality, objections by family members will also be legal to stop an organ from being removed). The rule in Germany is that those who are organ donors must have made a will, stating that clearly at some earlier time. In the USA, everyone who agrees to be an organ donor has to register in a special registry. Canada, Australia and Great Britain have a similar regulation than the USA. The length of time on the Austrian waiting list had not changed since years. One can expect to receive a kidney within about two years. However the time is much longer between supply and demand – availability and receiving an organ.

“The regulation that someone has to give permission during ones lifetime appears at first sight ethically correct,” said Thomas Kopetzky, medical attorney at the University of Vienna. “But, the end result is an organ shortage, that increases the possibility that people will go to a market where ethics do not play a role.”

In short, good ethics have unethical results. Or, coming more to the point, “whoever agrees during ones lifetime to donate ones organ to medicine may save perhaps the life of a sick person – and perhaps also the life of a Chinese prisoner. The forward-looking regulation in Austria can be traced back historically to the time when absolutisms was preached, the time when Emperor Joseph II legalized autopsies on cadavers. Before that time, only executed prisoners became donors.

Be it as it may be that the Chinese practice of “Execution on demand” is a real bizarre form of human rights violation, but so is the worldwide organized criminal underground organ trade, exploitation of poverty and immoral profiteering. And the business flourishes. The greater the scarcity of donor organs in a rich society, the more brazen and prevalent will be the storing of human parts by people in third world countries.

You only need to look the story of Laudiceia da Silva, a young Brasilian lady who had a cyst removed in a hospital in Sao Paolo. She was told the most horrible news during post surgical treatments at her regular doctor’s office. The surgeon did not only remove the cysts, but also a kidney disappeared. This is apparently a normal activity in local hospitals to supplement the budget. It is not common that street children disappear in Russia. Rumors persist that tell that many of them end up on the international organ market – as trade goods.

Horror stories like the above are only the tip of the iceberg. The routine of worldwide organ trade is actually not speculative. There are clinics, such as the one owned by the Indian surgeon K.C. Reddy in Chennai, who boasts that his clinic is not a grubby transplant factory, but a great business. Rich patients from throughout the world can receive an organ here with the most advanced techniques and under the best medical conditions. The donors are poor Indians who are very much in need of that money and who will live in the future with one kidney, but can live with less financial difficulties the rest of their life. The donors will receive about 1,000 Euros. The donors will receive accurate information and they will be taken care off. Everything happens on an equal basis, clean, lawfully and voluntarily.

But, what does “voluntarily” actually mean- if, like in the Philippines the average family income of an organ donor is around 25 Euro? Especially in an emerging market, where the most advanced medical technology is available, the private health industry booms – mostly without controls.

Lets take for example the “Soenmez Hospital,” an elegant building built in the glass-concrete-style in Istanbul, Turkey, on the Asian side of the Bosporus. Dr. Yusuf Ercin Soenmez operates at that place a legal “Clinic for organ trade,” according to the TV station Turk-CNN. Soenmez’s biography reads like the script of a horror movie. Already in 2005, Soenmez lost his license once. The police caught him during a sting with the scalpel in his hand. The transplant surgeon was convicted for “Establishing a criminal association that would become an illegal organ trade.” His penalty– he was “released on parole.” Police investigations discovered that Soenmez had organ donors from Turkey, Rumania, Bulgaria, Moldova, White Russia and Russia and that the kidneys were transplanted into Israeli, British and French patients. The donors received mostly around $1,500 and the recipient of the organs paid $150,000. The difference was pocketed by the doctor, or rather the Turkish organ Mafia. You may call me Doctor Frankenstein,” said Soenmez during an interview, “but I’m a doctor and fulfill my duty.”

Manfred Nowak’s office is on the fourth floor of the Schottenstift, a peaceful corner in Vienna’s first district. The Ludwig-Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights just moved there and Nowak sits there and goes through his correspondence with the Chinese officials. “The market place demands cheap organs and looks for bargains,” said the UN Rapporteur. From a moral standpoint, that sounds rather awful. “But, the accusations against China is a totally different issue. In this case, the market mechanics are coinciding with a state sanctioned suppression mechanism.”

Market, authoritarianism, global disparities – a fatal mixture! Novak looks disbelievingly at one of the letters from the Chinese regime where they categorically deny the accusation. Two pages! “This is just not enough,” said Novak. The evidence documented in the Canadian Matas-Kilgour report is much to sound [for such as short response].

From time to time one’s breath stops when reading the report. Chinese members of the research team just called the hospitals and identified themselves as potential clients. When asked for the availability of young and healthy organs from Falun Gong adherents, the medical head of one of the transplant teams said, “Yes, they are generally available to us.” The next question by the researchers, “And what about now?” was answered with “Yes.”

Another surgeon suggests to the patient that she should contact Guangzhou’s University hospital. “Do they have organs from Falun Gong people?” – “Correct” is the answer. Next question “Is the organ from a healthy Falun Gong practitioner?” – The answer is “correct. We will choose only the good one because the quality of our transplants is guaranteed.” The next question – “How old are the donors generally?” was answered with “Around thirty.”

Client and supplier discussions go just like the above are ordinary where a market system and a state sanctioned repressive system commit to a macabre relationship. In China the clinics advertise without any shame the perfect cooperation between medical people, government “and the courts.” The old banners with the communist rallying cry that hang outside the hospitals look just like a sick joke.

One of the slogans that weave in the wind says, “Keep humans in the most important place.”

The original German article can be read here.