China killing jailed Falun Gong members to harvest organs for sale. West starting to pay attention

More good news from "moderate" communist China - Host of the 2008 Olympic Games.

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Western countries are beginning to pay high-level attention to accusations that Chinese authorities are killing jailed members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement in order to sell their body parts for organ transplants.

A subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on the accusations on September 29. The matter was also raised at foreign-minister level at the China-European Union summit meeting on September 9 in Helsinki.

Commissioned Research

The allegations gained fresh momentum as a result of a report published on July 6 by two Canadian human rights lawyers, who examined in detail claims that the Chinese authorities are killing prisoners in order to sell their organs at home and overseas.

A Falun Gong association in North America asked the two lawyers, David Matas and David Kilgour, to help them investigate allegations that prisoners not sentenced to death by any court were being killed.

The two are experienced human rights lawyers. Kilgour is a former Canadian secretary of state, and Matas is a well-known specialist in refugee, immigration, and rights issues.

They say in their report that they have not found any hard evidence to prove these grave charges against China. Nevertheless, Kilgour and Matas claim to have established a sequence of circumstantial evidence that suggests such a trade is going on. It involves victims, in particular, from the Falun Gong.

Beijing Denial

Kilgour and Matas were not allowed to visit China in person. As they point out, after such organ removals are purportedly carried out, an empty operating room holds no clues. Nor do the bodies remain: Authorities are said to cremate the remains after the liver, kidney, heart or other organs are removed.

The Chinese government rejects the whole story as "extremely irresponsible." The political counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Australia, Ou Boqian, told RFE/RL that the accusation is totally false.

"Let me say, putting it briefly, that this is really a fabricated story; it does not exist," Ou said.

She noted that the international press was invited to view some medical facilities that Falun Gong named as killing centers, and they found nothing amiss.

Many Went In...

When it was banned by Chinese authorities in 1999, the Falun Gong had tens of millions of members -- many thousands of whom were arrested or sent to labor or reeducation camps. U.S. officials have estimated that police ran hundreds of reeducation camps with a holding capacity of 300,000 people.

Lawyers Matas and Kilgour say many of the rounded-up Falun Gong declined to give their identification details to authorities, fearing that their families would suffer. This protected the families, they say, but at the same time left the prisoners untraceable by their families -- and made it easier for the prisoners to quietly disappear. Could these be at least some of the donors for China's massive organ-transplant business?

According to figures supplied by the vice chairman of the China Medical Organ Transplant Association, Professor Bingyi Shi, there were some 60,000 transplant operations carried out in China between 2000 and 2005.

But Matas and Kilgour estimate that only about 18,000 organ donations in that period came from official sources -- that is, individuals donating their organs posthumously or from formally executed death-row prisoners. They say this leaves a shortfall of some 40,000 organ donations, and wonder aloud where those organs came from.

Sufficient Incentive?

Certainly a motive for criminal activity is provided by the profits to be made from organ transplanting. The China International Transplantation Network Assistance Center in Shenyang earlier this year carried a list of prices for body parts. The list put the price of a kidney at $62,000, of a liver at $130,000, the same for a heart, and of a lung at $150,000.