Wang Haibo, an unofficial representatives to the world on China’s organ transplant policies, recently told a well-known German journalist that the Chinese regime had no intention of announcing a schedule for weaning itself off the use of organs from executed prisoners.
Wang, director of the China Organ Transplant Response System Research Center of the Ministry of Health, would not say how many organs come from executed prisoners. Some outside groups suggest that there are 4,000 executions per year, though only a portion of those would yield organs viable for transplant.
One of the major disputes that international Western medical groups have with the Chinese authorities is its practice of harvesting the organs from executed prisoners.
In the way this is generally meant by the Chinese authorities, the term refers to organs from criminals who are sentenced to death and have their organs extracted after they are executed given that, at least in theory, they and their families have signed a consent waiver. Families are also entitled to compensation for agreeing to the organ extraction.
Many analysts also point to a more sinister source of prisoner organs: those that come from executed prisoners of conscience, who are not formally sentenced to death through the courts for any crime, but who are held in arbitrary detention, blood-tested, and killed as their organs as required.
Reports emerged in 2006 and 2007 of the widespread harvesting of practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline heavily persecuted by the Chinese regime.
Source: Epoch Times, April 11, 2014
