By Charlotte Cuthbertson, Epoch Times Staff,  Aug 5, 2009 -

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Dr. Manfred Nowak (Via The Epochtimes)

No straight answers have been produced by the Chinese regime over the allegations of state-sanctioned organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners, says Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.

“The Chinese government has yet to come clean and be transparent,” said Nowak in an interview with The Epoch Times. “It remains to be seen how it could be possible that organ transplant surgeries in Chinese hospitals have risen massively since 1999, while there are never that many voluntary donors available.”

The Chinese Communist Party has denied the allegations for three years despite several compelling investigative reports and several probes by the United Nations. Falun Gong is a spiritual practice based on truth, compassion, tolerance, and includes five sets of meditative exercises. In July 1999, the communist regime in China began persecuting people who practice it.

Investigative Reports

International human rights lawyer David Matas, and former crown prosecutor and member of parliament, David Kilgour, published their first report in July 2006, following up with a second in January 2007.

Their report, “Bloody Harvest: Revised Report Into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China,” concludes: “We believe that there has been and continues today to be large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners … The very horror made us reel back in disbelief.”

Major findings include 41,500 organs in transplants unaccounted for between 2001 and 2005. Transplants increased in parallel with the persecution of Falun Gong. In 2001 the amount of liver transplants in China numbered seven. By 2005 it had reached 2,168 for one hospital. The Chinese military is heavily involved in the transplant system in China, and the regime has admitted that the vast majority of organs for transplant come from executed prisoners.

“The explanation that most of these organs come from death row inmates is inconclusive,” said Nowak. “If so, the number of executed felons must then be much higher as so far assumed. I have asked the Chinese government to provide clarity and asked for precise data.”

The accusations remain, said Nowak. “They were denied, but the Chinese government has not invalidated them, but on the other hand they haven´t been proven either. This makes for a difficult dilemma—one that only be resolved if China is willing to cooperate. And that is what is lacking.”

United Nations Requests Ignored

Nowak has submitted two reports to the U.N. Human Rights Council formally requesting the Chinese regime respond to the allegations. The report states, in part, that, “The [Falun Gong] practitioners were given injections to induce heart failure, and therefore were killed in the course of the organ harvesting operations or immediately thereafter.”

“Nothing seems to have changed for the better,” said Nowak. “We lack exact statistics. I cannot say if the situation has changed since I left China. But I have no reason to assume anything has turned for the better, because I have not had any such hints. The majority of the inmates in these [forced labor] camps were Falun Gong members. And that is so frightening, because none of these people were ever given the benefit of a trial. They were never charged.”

“Bloody Harvest” outlines extraordinarily short wait times for organs in China—one to two weeks for a liver compared with 32.5 months in Canada (median wait for 2003) as a further incriminating factor. Kilgour and Matas also present self-accusatory material from Chinese transplant centre Web sites that advertise the immediate availability of large numbers of organs from living donors. Organ price lists were available on Chinese hospital Web sites.

The Kilgour-Matas report includes evidence from a hospital Web site (now removed), that claims, from “January 2005 to now, we have done 647 liver transplants—12 of them done this week. The average waiting time is two weeks.”

A chart also removed about the same time indicates that in 1998 the hospital completed only nine liver transplants—by 2005 it had completed fully 2248.

No Trials, Forced Labor Camps

In a 2005 trip to China that took Nowak 10 years of requests to the regime, he discovered that two-thirds of the torture cases reported in labor camps were Falun Gong practitioners.

Falun Gong practitioners are put into forced labor camps, said Nowak. “In the same way the officials deal with prostitutes or with those that exhibit ‘other socially damaging behavior.’ One can say that a relatively big part of the inmates in these camps are Falun Gong persons. It definitely is one of the largest groups.”

Nowak said the number of practitioners in China is huge. “In spite of the persecution [it] has not diminished, but increased,” he said.

“Genocide has a specific background—ethnic, racist, or religious discrimination; in this case it could be religious discrimination. “[What the regime is doing] amounts to a systematic repression of a specific group of people for religious/political reasons, although the Chinese leadership has always denied this to be a religious movement.”…… (more details from The Epochtimes)

NTDTV, via Youtube, July 15, 2009-

Numbers are symbols; they represent anything and everything. But they also hide what they represent, like a mask. In ten years, the names of over 3,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been collected; they are the names of people who have been killed through torture by Chinese authorities. But, how many more people simply disappeared after the persecution began? And what is the connection to China’s booming organ transplant industry. Though the truth is still unknown, the evidence points to a disturbing conclusion about the new China, and of what the rest of the world is willing to ignore. In this original investigation, NTD attempts to discover: ‘what happened to the people who disappeared?’

- NTDTV

Paper prepared by Hon. David Kilgour, J.D. for An International Forum on the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Garden Villa Hotel, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, 11 December, 2008 – (cont’d)

UN Committee Against Torture

The Chinese government should listen to the appeals of the world community and take effective action both to stop human rights violations and to punish those, including party members, who perpetrate them. One such appeal was issued last month by the United Nations Committee against Torture (CAT), which demanded that China’s party-state “immediately conduct or commission an independent investigation of the claims that some Falun Gong practitioners have been subjected to torture and used for organ transplants and take measures, as appropriate, to ensure that those responsible for such abuses are prosecuted and punished.” The statement was made in the committee’s concluding observations on the Convention against Torture and the experience in China. It can be found at <www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/docs/CAT.C.CHN.CO.4.pdf>.

“The Government of China should do what the Committee recommends. Failure to conduct or commission an independent investigation on organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners would put China in violation of its international obligations under the Convention against Torture, which the Government of China freely signed and ratified”, said David Matas, my co-author of a report of organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners. It is rare for the UN system to call the Government of China to account for its human rights violations. The Committee against Torture must be commended for its willingness to confront directly the very real human rights problems the Government of China has posed to the world.

The Committee considered the China compliance report in Geneva for three days only last month. It had a briefing session on November 6th with non-governmental representatives, which David Matas attended. The first report of Matas and myself on organ pillaging from Falun Gong practitioners was released in July 2006 and a second version in January 2007. It is available on the Internet at www.organharvestinvestigation.net

The Beijing party-state, of course, rejected both the CAT report and our independent report without making a single substantive point on its side of the controversy. As the Chinese Medical Association (CMA), which has certainly not been independent from the Party since 1948, agreed with the World Medical Association earlier this year before the Beijing Olympics not to allow any further ‘organ tourism’ within China, the conclusions in both reports would strongly appear to have been admitted by the CMA as in reality a branch of China’s regime. There are now about 52 pieces of evidence on our report website indicating that this grotesque commerce is occurring on a large scale across China.

The killing without any form of prior trial of thousands of Falun Gong citizens of China in order to sell their vital organs often to ‘organ tourists’ from wealthy countries is unimaginable to most people around the world today. One of Canada’s national dailies, the Globe and Mail, weighed in editorially on the UN Torture report recently: “… the full police-state playbook is in evidence… People trying to come to Beijing to petition the authorities for redress of their grievances may disappear into secret centres – ‘black jails’ – without review by a judge. Even on death row, prisoners are subject to abusive conditions, such as being shackled 24 hours a day. And there are continued reports that organs are harvested from the executed without their prior consent, or their family’s.”   (to be cont’d)

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- Original from http://david-kilgour.com/

AFP, Nov. 21, 2008-

GENEVA (AFP) — A UN body has expressed deep concern over allegations of widespread torture in China and called on the country to fully probe rights abuses.

The United Nations Committee Against Torture, meeting in Geneva, also revisited the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, urging the government to grant reparations and investigate the crackdown.

“The committee remains deeply concerned about the continued allegations, corroborated by numerous Chinese legal sources, of routine and widespread use of torture and ill treatment of suspects in police custody, especially to extract confessions or information to be used in criminal proceedings,” it said in a report released Friday.

It hit out at “continued reliance on confessions as a common form of evidence for prosecution, thus creating conditions that may facilitate the use of torture and ill-treatment of suspects,” quoting the case of dissident and human rights militant Yang Chunlin.

The committee also criticised China’s handling of its relations with the Tibetan Autonomous Region, noting there had been “longstanding reports of torture, beatings, shackling and other abusive treatment, in particular of Tibetan monks and nuns.”

No inquiry had been carried out into the arrests, firing on crowds of peaceful demonstrators, torture or cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment during the recent repression in Tibet, the experts noted.

Regarding the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown, the committee said China “should conduct a full and impartial investigation” of the events.

It added that Chinese authorities should “provide information on the persons who are still detained from that period” as well as “offer apologies and reparation as appropriate and prosecute those found responsible for excessive use of force, torture and other ill treatment.”

More generally, the committee pointed to “reports of abuses in custody, including high numbers of deaths… Reeducation through labour for individuals who have never had their case tried in court, nor the possibility of challenging their administrative detention,” and secret detention facilities.

The UN experts expressed concern about the fate of Hu Jia, like other human rights backers the victim of harassment and violence committed by thugs who were unofficially recruited by the authorities.

The Committee Against Torture mentioned allegations of removal of organs from members of the Falun Gong sect for transplant. The special UN rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak was quoted as saying that “an increase in organ transplant operations coincides with the beginning of the persecution of (Falun Gong practitioners).”

The committee was also concerned about the fate of North Korean refugees who were turned back at the border despite the risk that they would be subjected to torture in their own country.

Finally, the committee said it was worried about the conditions of people on death row who were chained day and night and whose organs could be removed for transplant after their death without their prior consent, according to information received by the experts.

Earlier this month, the committee’s chief rapporteur Felice Gaer had accused the Chinese of not providing sufficient information.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang denied this and said earlier this month that “it is China’s consistent stance that we oppose torture.”

Gaer had said China had been unwilling to release data on individual cases by invoking its State Secrets Act to withhold information.

- AFP

Michael Learmonth , Silicon Alley Media, August 25, 2008-

One of China’s biggest fears going into the Olympics was that the event would give a bigger megaphone to banned groups, such as the Free Tibet movement and the Falun Gong religious sect.

China appears to have done a thorough job of suppressing overt protests — and even restricted access to Web sites for visiting journalists — but it appears Falun Gong has managed to use the newfound focus on China to their advantage.

The group had 13 videos among the top 100 most-viewed during the first week of the Beijing Olympics, netting 3.5 million views. And it had four videos among the top 100 the following week, netting 1 million views. That’s according to TubeMogul, which tracks video views across 20 sites, including YouTube, Revver, Dailymotion and Metacafe.

It’s the first time Falun Gong has any video in the top 100 since TubeMogul started keeping track in 2006, and until opening day of the Olympics Falun Gong videos had netted a mere 95,000 views. What changed? Hard to say; a PR push could have helped, as could paid promotion on some sites. It also helps that the videos make sensational claims, including this “news” report on organ stealing in Chinese labor camps.

- Original: Silicon Alley Media

Former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour and David Matas, a human rights lawyer, on August 22, 2008, released a new letter, describing new evidence about continued murder of Falun Gong practitioners in China for their organs.

By Ben Bendig, Epoch Times Staff Aug 24, 2008 -

New evidence of the Chinese regime’s practice of harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners has come to light through the admission of a Chinese doctor.

An audio recording of the doctor admitting to having taken part in harvesting organs from Falun Gong practitioners, together with a state-endorsed documentary in which the same doctor acknowledges taking part in the conversation, is “an undeniable, inculpatory admission of the harvesting of Falun Gong practitioner prisoners for profit,” say David Matas, a human rights lawyer, and David Kilgour, former Canadian secretary of state (Asia Pacific), in a letter released yesterday.

Matas and Kilgour had their investigators call Chinese hospitals inquiring about organ transplants, specifically if they could get organs from Falun Gong practitioners, the rationale being that Falun Gong practitioners are healthy, owing to their practice.

In one case, Dr. Lu Guoping at Minzu Hospital of Guangxi Autonomous Region said that his hospital used to have organs from Falun Gong practitioners, but didn’t any longer. Here is a portion of the transcript:

“Caller: …what you used before, were they from detention centers or prisons?

“Lu Guoping: From prisons.

“C: Oh, prisons. And it was from healthy Falun Gong practitioners, the healthy Falun Gong right?

“LG: Right, right, right. We would choose the good ones, because we will assure the quality of our operations.

“C: That means you choose the organs yourselves?

“LG: Right, right, right.”

He later referred the caller to a hospital in Guangzhou, saying that this hospital would have Falun Gong organs.

Where the new evidence comes to bear is that in a documentary released by Phoenix TV, Lu Guoping admits to having received the call, and also to referring the caller to a Guangzhou hospital.

However, he denies what he said, stating in the interview, “I told her [the caller] I was not involved in the surgical operations and had no idea where the organs come from. I told her I could not answer her questions. She then asked me whether these organs come from prisons. I replied no to her in clear-cut terms.”

When shown a transcript of the interview on the video, Dr. Lu claims that it is a distorted version of the conversation. However, the documentary makes no mention of an audio recording, and no explanation for how the recording could have his voice saying some things that he admits, and other things he denies saying. Matas and Kilgour, in their report of the new evidence, make the point that the documentary suggests an altered transcript, but because there is no mention in the documentary of the recording, the recording itself is not being disputed.

Matas and Kilgour sum up the evidence: “So here we have on our recording an admission from a doctor that he and his colleagues used to go to a prison to select Falun Gong practitioners for their organs. He does not just say that someone else did this. He says that he and his colleagues used to do this themselves. Moreover, we have a further admission that the voice we have on our recording is the voice of the very person our recording says he is.”

One particularly damning aspect of the documentary is that it is available through Chinese consulates and embassies.

“[C]onsequently,” Kilgour and Matas state in their letter, concerning the documentary, “it has the sanction of the Government of China. The admission is, accordingly, one which is sanctioned and approved by the Government of China and can not credibly be denied by the Government.”

Kilgour and Matas have been investigating claims of Falun Gong organ harvesting since 2006. Some of evidence includes 40,000 transplants that have taken place in China with donors unaccounted for, since the persecution of Falun Gong began in 1999. Additionally, waiting times for organs in China are on the order of weeks, while in Western countries, the wait can be months or years.

Matas and Kilgour’s letter, along with links to the Phoenix TV video (with English subtitles), Chinese and English-language copies of the transcript of the conversation with Dr. Lu, and the audio recording of Dr. Lu, are available at: http://organharvestinvestigation.net/Dr.Lu-Voice-Recording/

- Original: Admission of Organ Harvesting is ‘Undeniable,’ Say Investigators , The Epochtimes

Jennifer Macey, The World Today program, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Austrlia, Tuesday, 12 August , 2008-

ELEANOR HALL: China’s human rights record is again under scrutiny, this time at an International Transplantation Congress in Sydney. A Canadian human rights lawyer says he has new evidence of forced organ removals from prisoners and Falun Gong practitioners in China.

David Matas says Chinese hospitals perform 10,000 organ transplant operations each year and that many of the recipients are foreigners. As Jennifer Macey reports, he’s now calling on the Australian Government to do more to stop the practice.

JENNIFER MACEY: China performs an estimated 10,000 organ transplant operations each year more than any other country in the world except for the United States. But China has no formalised system of organ donations and human rights groups say the short waiting times and availability of organs in China raises serious questions about their source.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch first reported 10 years ago that the majority of these organs come from prisoners. Now Canadian Human Rights Lawyer David Matas says among the prison population, it’s now members of Falun Gong who are being increasingly targeted.

DAVID MATAS: China’s source of organs for transplants is almost entirely from prisoners according to the Deputy Minister of Health it’s 95 per cent, according to other statistics it’s 96 per cent. So it’s almost entirely forced organ harvesting. And there’s two sources – it’s prisoners sentenced to death and Falun Gong practitioners.

JENNIFER MACEY: Mr Matas says hospitals and prisons have arrangements to split the profits made through organ transplant operations, often to foreign patients. He says the prisoners are killed after their organs are removed.

DAVID MATAS: Basically they wait until there’s an order from the hospital, they will blood test the person, and then they inject the person with potassium, and then they put them into a van and the actual organ extraction is in the van, where the prisoner is killed through the organ extraction and then the body is cremated.

JENNIFER MACEY: Last year David Mr Matas and Canadian former secretary of state David Kilgour released a report investigating allegations of organ harvesting of Falun Gong members in China. Mr Matas concedes it’s difficult to find proof of this practise as China won’t release official statistics on executions or organ transplants

But he says he has new audio tapes of Chinese doctors admitting they have Falun Gong organs for sale.

DAVID MATAS: We had callers calling in to China pretending to be relatives of patients who needed organs and asking the hospital that they were calling for organs of Falun Gong practitioners on the basis that Falun Gong’s an exercise regime that practitioners are healthy and their organs are healthy. And we got admissions on tape throughout China and we’ve got the transcripts in our report and we’ve got phone records and we got the tapes from pick up to hang down.

JENNIFER MACEY: Dr Yuan Hong worked as a heart surgeon for ten years at a medical university hospital in north eastern China. He says it was an open secret at his hospital that prisoners organs were used in transplant operations for patients who had travelled from Japan.

YUAN HONG (translated): I start to notice these issues because one of the nurse wearing the army dress and then I also find an anaesthetist also wear the same clothes. So I ask him “why do you have to wear these clothes?” and then he told me, “we have to go to the place where people do executions, so we needed to transplant a kidney there.”

JENNIFER MACEY: So you knew of Japanese people who were coming to your hospital for organ transplants?

YUAN HONG (translated): Because foreigner came to our hospital to be treated. It’s a hot topic, so everybody knows.

JENNIFER MACEY: Jennifer Zeng is a member of Falun Gong who was offered asylum in Australia several years ago. In China she spent a year in a labour camp near Beijing. She says at the camp her blood was taken for tests and she underwent several health checks.

JENNIFER MACEY: Only Falun Gong practitioners were tested and get this physical check up. A lot of Falun Gong practitioners thought that Falun Gong got some special treatment, because they saw a physical check up after you were there for long years, it’s good for your health.

So they ask the police, ‘how about we pay for the physical check’ and the police clearly said no, it’s only for Falun Gong. So other prisoners even protested against it, they say, they are not treated fairly because they obviously didn’t know the purpose.

JENNIFER MACEY: Human rights lawyer David Matas says there’s a lot more the Australian Government could do to help stamp out the practice.

DAVID MATAS: The Government’s could introduce extra-territorial legislation so that transplant tourism can become a crime, the way now child sex tourism is a crime,.

ELEANOR HALL: Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas ending that report by Jennifer Macey.

- Original: Falun Gong prisoners targeted for organs: report

ABC News, Australia, Aug. 11, 2008-

A human rights lawyer from Canada has called on the Australian Government to ban transplant tourism.

David Matas is addressing the International Congress of the Transplantation Society in Sydney today, where he says he will present new evidence of forced organ removals from prisoners and Falun Gong practitioners in China.

Mr Matas says he has audio tapes of Chinese doctors admitting they have Falun Gong organs for sale.

“We had callers calling into China pretending to be relatives of patients asking hospitals if they had organs of Falun Gong practitioners for sale on the basis that the Falun Gong is an exercise regime and they’re healthy, and therefore their organs are healthy, and we got admissions throughout China that yes, we have these organs for sale,” he said.

Mr Matas also says until recently, the main market for these organs was foreigners seeking cheap transplants.

“China still does not have a generation system for organs, does still not have a law allowing for the sourcing of organs from a brain dead cardiac alive, it still does not have a national organ distribution and sharing system, it’s still the overwhelming 90, 95-96 per cent of its organs are sourced from prisoners,” he said.

- Original: ABC News, Australia

Egovmonitor.com, UK , 9 May 2008-

Two United Nations Special Rapporteurs have reiterated their previous findings on China’s organ harvesting. Once again, they requested the Chinese government to fully explain the allegation of taking vital organs from Falun Gong practitioners and the source of organs for the sudden increase in organ transplants that has been going on in China since the year 2000.

Ms. Asma Jahangir and Mr. Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteurs on Freedom of Religion or Belief and on the Question of Torture, made the request jointly and documented it in their respective 2008 annual reports to the UN Human Rights Council, as a follow-up to their previous communications to the Chinese government.

The two Special Rapporteurs, together with Ms. Sigma Huda, the UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, transmitted their original communication to China on August 11, 2006. Drawing on information submitted by individuals and volunteer groups, including the Falun Gong Human Rights Working Group (FalunHR), the Special Rapporteurs highlighted and raised questions about the identifiable sources of organs, the short waiting times for finding perfectly-matched organs, and the correlation between the sudden increase in organ transplants in China and the beginning of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.

Although the Chinese government responded in November 28, 2006, with categorical denials, it failed to address the critical issues raised by the Special Rapporteurs. The follow-up communication by Ms. Jahangir and Mr. Nowak, sent on January 25, 2007, holds the Chinese government to address those critical issues.

FalunHR has posted the Special Rapporteurs’ original and follow-up communications at (http://www.falunhr.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1693&Itemid=0)

The Special Rapporteurs’ original communication is documented in their respective 2007 annual reports, and their follow-up communications in their 2008 annual reports. The annual reports of UN Special Rapporteurs typically document their previous year’s activities, and these reports are usually presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council during its spring sessions.

It is important to note that, in their 2008 annual reports, Ms. Asma Jahangir and Mr. Manfred Nowak also reported their joint urgent action, together with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, on behalf of Mr. Cao Dong, a witness to China’s organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners.

On May 21, 2006, in Beijing, Mr. Cao met with Edward McMillan-Scott, the Vice-President of the European Parliament, and gave him testimony on China’s organ harvesting. Following this meeting, the Chinese authorities arrested Mr. Cao. Reports indicate that Mr. Cao was sentenced to five years in prison for “accepting illegal interviews.”

- Original from eGov Monitor: United Nations Human Rights Special Rapporteurs Reiterate Findings on China’s Organ Harvesting from Falun Gong Practitioners

By Shi Yu, Epoch Times Staff, Apr 15, 2008-

An article published in the April 4th edition of Qi Lu Evening , a newspaper in Shandong Province in eastern China, has attracted people’s attention and recently circulated throughout the Internet.

It reported that a young man temporarily working in Jinan City decided to donate his corneas after a kidney failure diagnosis. However, several major hospitals throughout the area explained that they were “not qualified” to accept the donation. An official in the Ophthalmology Department of the Jinan Central Hospital even mentioned that none of the corneas used by his department came from donations.

This report revisits the concern over the source of organs used for transplants in mainland China. Since witnesses testified on March 9, 2006 that China harvests organs from live Falun Gong practitioners at a hospital in Sujiatun, Shenyang City in northwestern China, Beijing has been confronted with increasing concern over the source of the country’s organ supply. Chinese authorities continue to proclaim that organs come mainly from donations, however the Qi Lu Evening report has further stoked public doubt.

(Photo at right: The Qi Lu Evening Newspaper reported on April 4, 2008 that many hospitals in Shandong Province are not qualified to accept donated organs./The Epoch Times)

Dr. Wang Wenyi, a practicing physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City has long dedicated herself to the investigation of the Chinese regime’s harvesting organs from living Falun Gong practitioners. She pointed out that to cover up the organ-harvesting atrocity the Chinese regime has repeatedly lied to the world. When questioned on the source of the organ supply in China, the regime initially claimed that they were donated, but later they admitted that the organs were harvested from death row criminals. However, the large number of organs being used for transplants in recent years, added by the short waiting period for matching organs, indicates the existence of a living organ bank consisting mostly of imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners.

The Qi Lu report described the case of Wei Linying, a 29-year-old man temporarily working in Jinan. Diagnosed with serious kidney failure in February, Wei decided to donate his corneas after his death. To help him find a place for donation, his family members came to Jinan and asked the Qi Lu reporter for assistance.

On the afternoon of April 4, the reporter called the Jinan municipal branch office and provincial and municipal branch offices of the Red Cross Society of China, the Shandong Ophthalmology Hospital and the Jinan Central Hospital. All of these medical institutions replied that they were not qualified to accept organ donations.

China expert Zhang Jielian says that the situation in Shandong province is the same across China. Because of their past traditions, Chinese people are not in the habit of donating their organs; as a result, there is no organ donor program in the country. Therefore, donation is not a likely major source for China’s organ supply.

On November 7, 2005, at WHO (World Health Organization) meeting in Manila, China’s Deputy Minister of Health, Huang Jiefu, admitted that the Chinese communist regime had been harvesting organs from executed criminals. This was the first official confession the regime made of this practice.

On March 9, 2006, the organ harvesting from live Falun Gong practitioners at the Sujiatun labor camp in Shenyang City was exposed. Confronted with shock and condemnation from the international community, the regime kept silent for 20 days before the regime’s foreign affair spokesman Qin Gang finally denied the allegation, arguing that all organ transplants were legal and had been agreed upon by the donors. Qin proclaimed that most of the organs were donated by patients’ relatives or victims of traffic accidents.

In November 2006, Huang Jiefu repeated in a meeting in Guangzhou that most of the transplanted organs in China were from criminals of death penalty.

In a BBC interview on Nov. 1, 2007, the Chinese regime’s Health Ministry spokesman Mao Qunan restated that “most of the transplanted organs were from criminals of death penalty.”

Dr. Wang Wenyi, who protested at the White House against Chinese leader Hu Jintao during his state visit on April 20, 2006, said the quantity of organs available from the executed criminals is far lower than the actual number of transplant operations, and it cannot explain why the organ donors can be identified within such a short time, either. She says that the regime’s explanation of harvesting organs from executed criminals is simply to divert public attention away from the organ harvesting of live Falun Gong practitioners.

Dr. Wang said once foreign patients receive notification from hospitals in China and make their payment, the transplant operation can proceed in as little as three days. In most cases, patients receive their organs within a week. Therefore, a “criminal”—with matching blood and tissue types—would have to be executed just a few days before, and be willing to donate his or her organs.

Dr. Wang believes that there is only one possibility to explain this coincidence— there exists an organ bank in China where live donors, whose blood and tissue types have been pre-recorded, can be retrieved whenever a paying customer needs one.

Referring to the Chinese regime’s official data, which mentions that 90,000 organ transplants were conducted before 2005, Wang estimates that 41,500 transplants should have taken place between 2000 and 2005. However, this number far exceeds the criminals executed in China over that time period. Without any other reasonable explanation, the only possible source of organs would be the large population of Falun Gong practitioners whose whereabouts are unknown after being arrested during the past eight years.

An independent Canadian delegate investigation published two reports in 2006, providing substantial evidence to illustrate that such “an evil that has never occurred on earth” has been truly ongoing.

In a report issued by the “World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong” (WOIPFG) in late 2007, the organization has interviewed several Chinese officials, including the coordinator of the kidney source in the Beijing 307 People’s Liberation Army Hospital, the chief and clerk associated with the No. 1 Criminal Court in the Jinzhou Intermediate People’s Court, and the surgeon in charge of kidney transplants at the Guangxi People’s Hospital. The interviewees’ testimony all indicates that a widespread program for organ harvesting from live Falun Gong practitioners is still ongoing in China.

- Original report from The Epochtimes: Chinese Hospitals Do Not Accept Donated Organs