Bioethics News for Health and Legal Professionals and the Media, Australia
The
Canadian government is planning to investigate allegations that Falun Gong members
in Chinese prisons are being murdered and their organs sold to transplant patients.
Former cabinet minister David Kilgour and a respected human rights lawyer, David
Matas, spent two months investigating the startling claims and have documented
them in a 60-page report. “The allegations, if true, would represent a grotesque
form of evil which, despite all the deprivations humanity has seen, would be new
to this planet,” they say. The Chinese government banned Falun Gong [slanderous
words deleted] in 1999 and has imprisoned large numbers of its supporters.
The
two men acknowledge that they have no eyewitness evidence, but from interviews
and careful analysis of publicly available information, they conclude that thousands
of people have been murdered. China has very few voluntary organ donors and relies
on harvesting organs from about 1600 prisoners executed each year. But since 1999
— the year of the crack-down on the group — organ transplants have soared. Kilgour
and Matas calculate that about 41,500 organ donors in that period are unaccounted
for-which they believe to be Falun Gong supporters.
One informant was the
divorced wife of a transplant surgeon who, she claimed, had removed the corneas
of 2,000 Falun Gong supporters in two years. The victims were first given an injection
to cause heart failure and their bodies were then cremated. Kilgour and Matas
also produced translated transcripts of conversations with jails whose officials
claimed that they could produce good quality organs quickly. Chinese hospitals
often advertise on their websites that they can supply suitable organs in as little
as one or two weeks. Kilgour and Matas point out that the median waiting time
in Canada was 32.5 months in 2003. “The astonishingly short waiting times
advertised for perfectly-matched organs would suggest the existence of both a
computer matching system for transplants and a large bank of live prospective
‘donors’.”
The Chinese government is on an ethical slippery slope which
began with capital punishment, the two Canadians claim. “When the state kills
defenseless human beings already in detention for their crimes, it becomes all
too easy to take the next step, harvesting their organs without their consent.
This is a step China undoubtedly took. When the state harvests the organs of executed
prisoners without their consent, it is another step that becomes all too easy
and tempting to take to harvest the organs of other vilified, depersonalised,
defenceless prisoners without their consent, especially when there is big money
to be made from it.”
They recommend that Chinese transplant surgeons
be banned from entering Canada and other countries and that all governments should
discourage their nationals from travelling to China for transplant operations.
[…]
http://www.australasianbioethics.org/Newsletters/currentbioedge.html
Posting
date: 19/July/2006
Original article date: 17/July/2006
Category: Media Reports
