Canada: Parliament Subcommittee Passes Motion Condemning Forced Organ Harvesting
Minghui.org
(Minghui.org) The Canadian Parliament’s Subcommittee on International Human Rights passed a motion on November 6, 2014 against state-sanctioned organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China.
The motion was passed after two hearings in February 2013 and October 2014, during which independent investigators presented evidence of the harvesting of organs from Falun Gong practitioners and other persecuted groups in China.
In the motion the subcommittee “expresses its deep concern over the persistent and credible reports of systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience and members of religious and ethnic minority groups in the People’s Republic of China.”
Moreover, the motion “condemns and calls for an immediate end” to this practice.
It also calls on the government to “discourage and prevent Canadians from taking part in transplant tourism, where the organs have not been obtained in an ethical, safe and transparent fashion.”
One year ago, a bill (Bill C-561) was introduced by Hon. Irwin Cotler, a longstanding Member of Parliament, on December 6, 2013, proposing to sanction all persons knowingly involved in organ harvesting.
The legislation will establish a list of individuals believed to have engaged in organ harvesting, and will require documentation of the source of the organs used in transplant operations.
Early this year, two independent Canadian investigators, David Kilgour (a former Member of Parliament) and David Matas (a human rights lawyer) presented evidence of forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners in China as a source of inspiration for the legislation.
Fifty-two types of evidence collected by Kilgour and Matas show that between 2000 and 2005, nearly 41,500 unidentified organs used in transplants in China had been harvested from Falun Gong practitioners.
In October, the committee heard from author and researcher Ethan Gutmann and Dr. Damon Noto of the NGO Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting.
Noto noted that several investigations into illegal organ harvesting in China have been performed, and the results “have all pointed to the use of prisoners of conscience as the main source of organs, with practitioners of Falun Gong comprising the vast majority.”
According to Dr. Noto, the number of organ transplants in China skyrocketed from a few hundred per year in 1999 to several thousand in 2004. The same thing happened to the transplant centers. The Chinese hospitals run transplant advertisements that guarantee matched organs in a matter of two weeks, and appointments for transplant surgeries can be made in advance, according to the patient’s schedule.
Some hospitals even claimed “superior results” and that tests can be done on “donors” prior to the removal of the organs, said Dr. Noto.
“If you follow the timeline of China’s transplant boom and you compare it with the start of the persecution of Falun Gong, which occurred in 1999, the timelines correspond almost exactly,” Noto told the committee.
At the hearing, Gutmann, who put seven years of research into his recently released book “The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem,” gave suggestions to the MPs—it is easy to make laws banning the organ trips to China.
He said that it is wrong to kill an innocent person in order to save a Canadian citizen; Canadians should follow their own values and not get involved in this crime.
Gutmann estimates that half a million to one million Falun Gong adherents are incarcerated at any given time.
“By 2008, approximately 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners had been harvested for their organs,” he told the committee.