China's Illicit Organ Trade Continues Unabated

The killing of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience in China for their organs was exposed in 2 reports and a 2009 book by Canadians David Matas and David Kilgour.

The book, "Bloody Harvest," revealed how Falun Gong prisoners who refused to recant after torture and who have "disappeared" by the thousands, were killed to supply human organs to feed a lucrative transplant tourism market.

After the allegations hit the mainstream press, in July 2006 the Chinese regime passed a law banning the sale of organs without the consent of the donor. However, Matas says the practice has actually increased since then.

"There remains a discrepancy between the volume of transplants and the volume of sources," he told The Epoch Times from his home in Regina.

"If anything the discrepancy is increasing, because the death penalty is going down and transplant volumes are going up. So if you look at it simply in terms of death penalty statistics and volume of transplants, then we'd have to conclude that the problem is not just continuing but getting worse."

The regime admitted in 2005 that it had been harvesting the organs of prisoners on death row, a practice that started in the mid-1980s.

"As for death penalty statistics, China doesn't produce them, but my own calculation was that they'd have to be executing people at the rate of 30,000 a year to produce organs for the volume of people that they're transplanting, and nobody suggests that they come anywhere close to that," Matas says.

In remarks given at given at a Congressional-Executive Commission on China roundtable in June 2010, author Ethan Gutmann said that the theft of organs has spread from the Falun Gong population to imprisoned Uighurs, Christians, and Tibetans.

In "China's Gruesome Organ Harvest," Gutmann interviewed several Falun Gong practitioners who had been blood- and organ-tested while incarcerated to gage their suitability as a donor -- something Matas says is still going on.

"We still get people coming out of China who are Falun Gong practitioners who were tortured and can tell about what happened to them, and they talk about the blood testing."

Gutmann also reports that although illegal organ harvesting was curtailed somewhat in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics to avoid any leaks that would embarrass the regime, after the Games were over it was back to business as usual.

Source: The Epoch Times, January 17, 2011