Event Recap: Conference on the CCP’s Forced Organ Harvesting

On February 24, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse hosted a virtual conference about the Chinese Communist Party’s forced organ harvesting. Forced organ harvesting is the practice of killing people for their organs.

The keynote speaker at the conference was Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. He is Chair of the China Tribunal, an independent tribunal into forced organ harvesting. The China Tribunal’s members have agreed unanimously that China is engaging in forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience. “If rights are universal, duties are universal too,” Nice stated. “If a finding is made that fundamentally breaches the rights of one group of people,” then, he said, “that breach engages in us the duty to do something to put it right.”

At the conference Kristina Olney, Director of Government Relations for VOC said, “The United States and the rights-respecting nations of the world must confront the evidence of this horrific human rights taking place in China today and hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its complicity.”

To hold the CCP accountable, Congress and other international governments must pass the bipartisan Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act. The bill would authorize the U.S. to sanction officials responsible for organ harvesting and prohibit the export of transplant surgery devices to entities responsible for forced organ harvesting. Additionally, it would require the State Department to write an annual report on human organ trafficking shedding light on these atrocious human rights abuses. This would help not only expose the CCP’s abuses, but also the abuses by Cuba’s communist regime.

VOC has published important work exposing China’s unjust forced organ harvesting. VOC China Studies Research Fellow Matthew P. Robertson wrote Organ Procurement and Extrajudicial and Execution in China detailing evidence of forced organ harvesting by the CCP against prisoners of conscience and ethnic and religious minorities. The report outlines China’s extreme growth in organ transplants in the early 2000s. Originally the Chinese government claimed these were all voluntary civilian donors. When this claim became indefensible, China claimed that organs were also coming from death row prisoners. However, this did not pass scrutiny either since there was a decline in death row executions following 2000. The only plausible source for the increase in organ transplants is forced harvesting from prisoners of conscience. Evidence points to the CCP making victims of Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghur Muslims, and other political prisoners.

Event Recording