— Washington, DC, September 10, 2025 —

The medical ethics advocacy group Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) is alarmed by a verbal exchange between CCP Chairman Xi and President Putin that was live-streamed from a military parade in Beijing on September 3, 2025.

A brief conversation between the Chinese and Russian government leaders about organ transplantation and longevity was captured on a broadcast livestream.

Xi’s translator: “In the past, people rarely lived longer than 70 years, but today they say that at 70 you are still a child.”

Putin’s translator: “Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and even achieve immortality.”

Xi’s translator: “Some predict that in this century, humans may live up to 150 years old.”

(Reuters, September 3, 2025)

The remarks referenced longevity in connection with the idea that human organs could be “continuously transplanted.”

DAFOH is extremely alarmed and concerned about this conversation and its ethical implications.

1) Analysis of the “hot mic” incident

The exchange was streamed live as the group of leaders and guests were walking uphill, a mildly strenuous activity that can cause exhaustion in elderly individuals. It was at that moment that the conversation about “young age” was caught on mic.

The conversation occurred between the highest-ranking government leaders of two authoritarian states. After Chairman Xi remarked that 70 years is still young, President Putin replied that “human organs can be continuously transplanted,” suggesting that repeated transplantation could be a pathway to extending life to 150 years. It goes without saying that a single organ transplant does not achieve such longevity. The casual tone with which both leaders spoke, without regard for the scarcity of donor organs, is disturbing. Ethical medical guidelines demand the question: Where do the organs come from?

Organs are not “spare parts” like those used to extend the life of a car. The implied notion of continuously replacing human organs as if they were interchangeable commodities is deeply troubling to any medical professional bound by the Hippocratic oath.

Two days later, Reuters was forced to take down the video clip. Reuters reported: “The footage, which included the open mic exchange from the military parade in Beijing marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two, was licensed by the Chinese state television network, China Central Television (CCTV).” If the conversation were merely about biotechnological advances or xenotransplantation, why would such drastic censorship be necessary? The removal only makes sense if the conversation was referencing sensitive information—such as the forced organ harvesting of living prisoners of conscience to provide an unlimited source of organs.

2) Forced organ harvesting from living prisoners of conscience

To consider “continuous transplantation” implies an abundant organ supply. Yet worldwide there is a critical shortage: only about 1% of registered organ donors ultimately become eligible donors. China claims 12% of registered donors are eligible—an implausibly high figure.

The unspoken explanation is forced organ harvesting from living prisoners of conscience, primarily Falun Gong practitioners. . The Chinese regime persecutes Falun Gong for its religious belief in truthfulness, compassion and forbearance for the past 26 years. Since 2006, when a whistleblower stepped forward, we learned that China’s transplant market is exploiting the bodies of Falun Gong practitioners by harvesting their organs for transplantation. With 100 million Falun Gong practitioners being persecuted through forced labor, brainwashing, torture, and eventually forced organ harvesting, the Chinese regime has turned its detention camps into “forced organ registries,” where Falun Gong practitioners are subjected to coerced blood tests and other medical examinations. The underlying concept of turning detention camps into “organ registries” is China’s “final solution” to annihilate Falun Gong practitioners while at the same time providing an abundance of organs within extremely short waiting times.

The secret of China’s “longevity” program is heinous and abominable: detain a persecuted minority and harvest organs on demand so that CCP leaders can extend their lifespans.

In 2019, the China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, concluded that forced organ harvesting had indeed taken place in China, with Falun Gong as the primary victims. In 2021, in an open letter, twelve UN special rapporteurs and experts echoed these concerns.

U.S. Rep. Chris Smith stated on March 27, 2023: “We also know through open-source Chinese media that elderly, high-ranking Communist Party officials have received replacement organs from the very people they despise and oppress at the People’s Liberation Army Hospital 301 in Beijing.”

3) From doctor to doctor

There is no question that transplant organs are scarce, and patients worldwide often wait years for a suitable donor. The purpose of medicine is to cure the sick—not to extend the lives of political elites through repeated organ replacement.

This ‘hot mic’ incident raises urgent ethical questions: should transplant medicine prioritize curing ordinary patients in need, or serve as a tool for authoritarian leaders to engineer longevity? Is transplant medicine on the verge of transforming from a healing profession into a bioengineering discipline to engineer longevity at the expense of other persons’ lives?

The transplant profession must not become a “fitness instrument” for replacing organs continuously in pursuit of longevity and immortality.

4) Calls to action

The implications of this “hot mic” incident are far more serious than mainstream media suggests.

1. We call upon world leaders who cherish human dignity and the sanctity of life, as well as all medical professionals bound by the Hippocratic oath, to stand up for ethical transplant practices and help stop forced organ harvesting of living prisoners of conscience in China by demanding independent, international investigations of the organ harvesting crimes committed by the Chinese state against Falun Gong practitioners, Uighurs and others.
2. We call upon transplant and medical associations worldwide to reject any suggestion that transplant medicine should serve as a tool to reach longevity or extending political elites’ lives.
3. We call upon every person in the world to break the silence on China’s forced organ harvesting crimes and to sign the G7+7 petition.

The post DAFOH statement on the ‘hot mic’ incident regarding organ transplantation and longevity on September 3 in Beijing appeared first on Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH).

They share a unified vision to protect and promote ethical medical and nursing practices worldwide. With the goal of advancing this mission and disseminating knowledge, this summit highlighted the importance of the topic of the crime of forced organ harvesting to the global nursing community.

The Nurses Summit featured nursing scholars, leaders, human rights experts and eye witnesses who are passionate about raising awareness about this problem, preventing collusion and to seeing it end.

Host and Speaker
Deborah Collins-Perrica, MSN, CNS, APRN

Speakers

1. Deborah Collins-Perrica, MSN, CNS, APRN

The post 2022 Inaugural Nurses Summit on Combatting and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting appeared first on Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH).

By Martina Keller, Die ZEIT

March 13, 2013

In China body organs are taken from executed prisoners, and for a fee, are then implanted in patients from the West.

When Beijing attorney Han Bing published his latest blog on December 6, 2012, he must have known he was placing himself at serious risk. His report spread like wildfire via the Chinese wire service Sina Weibo. “On this very morning,” Han reported, “a frightful execution took place.” A prisoner sentenced to death was reportedly executed although the highest Chinese court, a few days before, had ordered the case to be reexamined. Apparently, for the responsible parties, this was too long a wait. The prisoner’s body organs were needed and had to be in the best possible condition. There was no other explanation for why the execution took place in a clinic, according to the attorney’s report. “These unscrupulous judges and doctors are transforming a hospital into a place of execution – a marketplace for the organ trade,” Han wrote.

The attorney reports that the condemned man was forced to sign a document affirming his “voluntary” consent of the organ harvesting. His family members were not allowed to see him for a final visit although it was their right to do so. “We plan to appeal,” the attorney announced on behalf of the surviving dependents.

Han’s account was forwarded more than 18,000 times within a single day, and more than 5,600 people posted comments. Then the blog was erased.

This example of an anonymous execution victim is not an isolated case.  Statistically China is second worldwide, just behind the USA, for numbers of organ transplants. It is an accomplishment that fills the regime with pride. Every year more than 10,000 kidneys, livers, hearts and lungs are transplanted in China, as reported last year by Vice Minister of Health Huang Jiefu – himself a transplant specialist – in the medical journal The Lancet. His statistics indicate that more than 60 percent of these organs are taken from executed prisoners. The frankness of the report is astonishing. Until a few years ago, the government rejected all foreign reports on China’s questionable transplant practices as propaganda.

A person dies just in time to permit another person to continue living. This is possible in the Chinese transplant system. In the name of progress, in the name of money – including Western money, as will be seen.

The number of persons executed in China is a state secret. It is estimated that approximately 4,000 executions of prisoners take place in China per year. Those convicted are killed by a bullet to the head or by lethal injection. Insiders report that transplant clinics cooperate with prisons and send out their own teams for the organ removal. It is quite possible that physicians take part in executions.

Intensive research is conducted in China on ways to perform lethal injection without damaging the organs. Wang Lijun, the former chief of police of Jinzhou, received a long prison sentence last year following a political scandal. Wang headed a psychological-forensic research institute for several years. In 2006 Wang’s studies of execution methods brought him the country’s prestigious Guanghua Innovation Special Contribution Award. The award is the equivalent of about 200,000 Euros. The citation stated that he had developed a “brand-new protective fluid” for organs, ensuring successful transplants from executed prisoners despite lethal injection. In his acceptance remarks, Wang said he had conducted his execution experiments “on several thousand persons.” He called the experience “heart-wrenching.”

Elsewhere in the world, such reports trigger outrage. But there is one thing that scarcely anyone knows: The west is deeply implicated in the unethical Chinese system. Patients in western countries have to thank Chinese execution victims for their new kidneys, livers and hearts. Pharmaceutical firms supply the Chinese market with anti-rejection drugs, and conduct research on transplantation practices that in all likelihood have come from the use of organs from executed prisoners. Western clinics and doctors support China’s transplant centers, no questions asked. Western consultants to the Chinese government claim to be encouraging change in transplant practices, while at the same time they pursue business interests in China. Vehicles from the West are converted into mobile medical execution units. A Chinese car dealer, for example, offers a European-brand vehicle with medical monitoring equipment and infusion devices for sale on the Internet – a grisly symbol for the hand-in-hand work between executioners and doctors.

The various participants of China’s transplant industry and the physicians who violate the most basic ethical principles of their profession and prefer to stay silent, and cross the moral line between cooperation and complicity, make up the basis for this story. The question is: What is the impact of deteriorating medical ethics, the impact of ambitious research for personal gain and the impact of financial profit? And where must the West  draw the line to avoid complicity, to avoid the guilt?

Attorney Han Bing and his clients do not know who received the organs from the man who was executed in December, but there are patients who do come forward and speak of their transplant surgery in China. Mordechai Shtiglits lives with his wife in Petach Tikwa, near Tel Aviv. At age 63, despite his 120 kilos, he is a healthy man who loves steaks and is the happiest when spending time with his family. While his wife serves coffee in the living room, he pulls a photograph album out of a drawer. It documents his trip to China, one that for Shtiglits could have been his last.

In November 2005, when he was pushed on board an airplane in a wheelchair, Shtiglits could scarcely put one foot in front of the other. His wife and elder daughter accompanied him to Shanghai. On the day they arrived, Shtiglits was brought to Zhongshan Hospital, one of the largest transplant centers in China. He was given a room in the modern wing, reserved for foreigners and wealthy Chinese patients. There, Shtiglits met patients from Canada, Australia and Hong Kong. Like him, they were waiting for a life-saving operation.

Shtiglits’s own heart was failing, and he was facing the end of his life with just 10 percent functional capacity. With luck, that was just enough to keep him alive.  Shtiglits suffered from frequent near fatal cardiac arrests, but each time he was able to be revived. He spent some nights sitting in an upright position in an effort just to breathe.

For a year and a half he lay in the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv awaiting a new heart. But in Israel, organs are donated even less often than anywhere else in the world. So his family members took matters into their own hands. Shtiglits’s son went on the Internet in search of a new heart for his father. Everywhere he heard the same response, “Yes, you can come, but for a heart you have to reckon with waiting several months.”

But that, the family believed, was time that Shtiglits did not have. Therefore the choice fell on China. Since the state has drastically curtailed its subsidies to hospitals in China, many of them shore up their budgets with organ sales. In China you can receive a new heart within two or three weeks. If you are lucky, like Mordechai Shtiglits, the process can go even faster.

A week after his arrival in Shanghai, his Chinese surgeon informed him that he would receive his new heart on the following day. Shtiglits learned that the donor was 22 years old. He did not ask what had happened to the man. “I was ill, I was at death’s gate,” he says today. “They indicated that he was the victim of a traffic accident.”

That is extremely unlikely. It’s true that more than 60,000 persons die in road accidents each year in China. But even Chinese doctors do not know in advance when someone will die in an accident. And so far there is no central distribution system in the country for quick organ distribution.

Organ harvesting from executed persons is universally frowned upon. Transplants are based on the principle of voluntary organ donation, while prisoners have no freedom of choice. This is the view of the World Medical Association as well as that of The Transplantation Society. But that is not the end of the moral problem with China’s practice. If wealthy patients are to be supplied quickly with an organ, it is not sufficient to wait until a suitable donor happens by chance to be executed or die at the right moment. “Prison officials have to target potential donors on the basis of health, blood and tissue type, and execute them while the tourist is in China,” writes the renowned New York bioethicist Arthur Caplan in the 2012 book State Organs: Transplant Abuse in China: “This is nothing else but killing on demand.”

The history of this gruesome practice is thought to have started in the 1980s. At that time the Chinese transplant system was still in its infancy. But then a marked uptick began. Vice Minister of Health, Huang Jiefu, documented this trend in a presentation he made in Madrid in 2010, stating that the number of transplanted kidneys rose between 1997 and 2005 from 3,000 to 8,500 annually, while the figure for livers increased from 2,000 to about 3,000 a year. The prerequisite for this boom was new and improved anti rejection medications. These are medications that came from the West.

Cyclosporin A, a product of the Swiss Sandoz Corporation, is essential to the survival of transplant patients and has been supplied to China since the mid-1980s. Later, other Swiss firms, Roche and Novartis began to supply life sustaining transplant drugs. Today the owners of Sandoz, as well as the Japanese Astellas Corporation, sell their anti-rejection drugs in the People’s Republic of China.  Since 1994, at the latest, these firms would have known about these accusations against China.  At that time, the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch had published a detailed report.

In late 2005, Roche even began producing the anti rejection drug Cellcept inside China. At the opening ceremony for the production center in Shanghai, Roche CEO Franz Humer, according to a report in the Handelsblatt, justified the decision to begin production specifically in China.  “Unlike  Japan,” he said, “the country has no ethical or cultural barriers to transplantation medicine.”

The Chinese government has no such inhibitions. Citizens, on the other hand, are anxious. They show scarcely any willingness to donate organs voluntarily. Between 2003 and 2009 only 130 organ donors were registered in the entire country. Many Chinese distrust the health care system. They are afraid of being declared dead too early or of being abused by the organ business by donating their organs.

The Western pharmaceutical industry shares responsibility for scientific research in China. Research records list nine clinical studies in China with about 1,200 transplant patients, with whom Wyeth and Pfizer from the USA, Novartis and Roche from Switzerland, and Astellas from Japan have all tested their transplant drugs. Altogether the corporations have cooperated with 20 hospitals in China for these studies.

Die ZEIT asked the pharmaceutical companies how they ensured that no organs from executed persons were included in these studies. A few companies did not respond at all, while others avoided the concrete question. Roche and Pfizer only affirmed that the standards of the World Health Organization (WHO) had been met.

The WHO requires that organization and performance of transplant operations must be “transparent and accessible to scrutiny.” Human rights organizations have often complained that China consistently violates these rules.

It has been seven years since Mordechai Shtiglits received his new heart. Seven years of the gift of life. Shtiglits has to take a quantity of tablets daily, and not just to prevent rejection of his new heart. “My whole body gives me trouble, my kidneys, my legs, my head…But my heart is fine, it works 100 percent.” He laughs. “I have a young heart and an old body.”

Shtiglits spends his afternoons in a small shop at a tennis center where he and his wife sell drinks and sports equipment. While Shtiglits talks about his illness, his 2 1/2-year-old grandson romps around on a toy horse.

Shtiglits says: “Since the transplant operation, my children have married, I’ve experienced the birth of several grandchildren, and more grandchildren are on the way. I thank God – I can’t complain.” If organs of executed prisoners in China were transplanted, it’s all right with him. “The Chinese kill prisoners. That means that a person dies, no matter whether he gives away his heart or not.”

Mordechai Shtiglits’s old heart was removed on November 22, 2005, as is stated in the skimp discharge document issued to him by the doctors of Zhongshan Hospital. It contains only Shtiglits’s clinical condition upon his admission, a few laboratory figures along with data on the administered and recommended medications. Not a word about the donor or the transplanted organ, as is customary in such documents. By the year 2011, 300 hearts had been transplanted at Zhongshan Hospital. In an inquiry from Die ZEIT asking what institutions the hospital collaborated with in organ transplants the clinical leaders did not reply. This is not medical practice that is “transparent and accessible to scrutiny,” as required by the WHO.

The family commemorated the day of the transplant operation with a photograph: Shtiglits in his yarmulke, in prayer with a close friend who lives in Shanghai. At about two o’clock in the afternoon, Shtiglits was moved into the operating room. Shtiglits’s wife Ida and his daughter Osnat waited in the lobby. “In the middle of the operation, the doctor came out and handed me a plastic glove with something bloody in it,” Osnat recalls. “He said: Here’s your father’s pacemaker.”

By the next day, mother and daughter were already able to wave to Shtiglits through a window. He felt better with each passing day. “You could see the color returning to his face,” Osnat says. Her father had a nurse who looked after him around the clock. “The staff was always available. We got the best possible treatment.”

In fact, a few of the large Chinese transplant centers have medical outcomes today that are comparable to those of Western hospitals. But, as Vice Minister of Health Huang stated in the journal Liver Transplantation, “success was not quick and not easy.” Huang, who expresses himself willingly and often in professional circles, left questions from Die ZEIT unanswered. He specializes in transplant surgery in the complex field of liver transplantation. “Entire transplant teams from the People’s Republic have been trained abroad,” he writes. He burnished his skills in Australia.

Huang would probably not be allowed to take part in a transplant operation in Australia today. Medical centers there now impose regulations during the training of Chinese surgeons. Stephen Lynch, chief physician at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, requires that applicants submit a written confirmation from their clinical director, or a responsible person in the provincial government, “that the capabilities acquired from us shall not be applied in transplant programs that use executed prisoners as donors.”

German doctors are less scrupulous. At the German Heart Center in Berlin nearly 2,300 hearts have been transplanted since its founding in 1986. The Center cooperates with more than 30 hospitals in the People’s Republic, including transplant centers. As early as 2005, the personal assistant to medical director Roland Hetzer proudly reported on the Radio China International network that the Center had “nine ongoing collaborations with a cooperative agreement or a sign on the door.” This collaboration was initiated by Hetzer’s representative of many years standing, Weng Yuguo, a cardiac surgeon from Sichuan Province who held a German passport. Hetzer stated in May 2012, at a heart surgery conference in Shanghai that, “more than 500 physicians…from China have taken part in our work in Berlin over the years. A few of the surgeons have completed a full training program lasting five years. All of them have done good work after returning to their home country.”

This could be expressed differently. In Germany, Chinese doctors are receiving the skills that allow them to transplant organs from executed prisoners in China. Skills used for human rights violations.

Surgeon Liu Zhongmin is among the physicians who have worked for several years in Berlin. Today he is executive director of the Chinese-German Heart Institute in Shanghai, which was founded in 2000 by the German Heart Center and Shanghai East Hospital. The hospital is the closest cooperative partner of Germans in China. Liu’s qualifications can be found on the Heart Institute’s website. He is said to be responsible for clinical research for  heart transplants, artificial hearts and combined heart-lung transplantation.

How many hearts in total have been transplanted at the Chinese-German Heart Institute? Where do these organs come from? To these questions submitted in writing by Die ZEIT, Liu has given no response.

Weng, who has represented Hetzer for many years and is senior chief physician at the German Heart Center, is, like the surgeon Liu, an executive director of the Chinese-German Heart Institute. He travels to China several times a year. He directed the operation in which China’s first artificial heart was implanted in 2001.  Like Hetzer,  Weng failed to respond to Die ZEIT.

In the summer of 2012, in conjunction with a medical congress, we questioned Hetzer about removal of organs from executed prisoners in China. He stated, “Of course I don’t support that, but it’s not the case that anyone can simply say that it’s wrong. Someone is executed and takes his organs with him to the grave. How would you decide, if you knew you were going to be beheaded tomorrow?”

Jacob Lavee, who is Mordechai Shtiglits’s physician, considers it unethical even to raise this question. It is a question, he believes, that a doctor may not want to ask himself. But then, one day in the autumn of 2005, Lavee opened the door to a hospital room at the Sheba Medical Center that was occupied by his critically ill patient.

Shtiglits had been treated by Lavee for years. Lavee, director of the Heart Transplant Department at the hospital, had long since stopped holding out any hope for him. But on that day he found Shtiglits in good spirits. He announced that he was flying to China and would have a heart transplant operation in two weeks. “I smiled at him and said that was impossible,” Lavee recalls, “but he was in dead earnest.” A kidney or part of a liver can be removed from live donors. Lavee had heard of patients who went to China for a kidney, but this was a new dimension. “If you receive a heart, it means that someone else has to die.”

Shtiglits was the first, but not the last, of Lavee’s patients who traveled to China for a heart. The transplant specialist is aware of a dozen cases. One or two patients died, while others like Shtiglits, returned home in stable condition. As a doctor, Lavee wants the best for his patients, but not at any price. “Even for myself,” he says, with conviction, “I would not go to China. Even if I had to die.” But Lavee also says,“I don’t blame the patients. When your life is in danger, you grasp at any straw.”

After Shtiglits returned from China, Lavee continued to treat him as a patient. The heart specialist is happy about the progress Shtiglits is making. At the same time he is beginning to campaign politically against other patients receiving heart transplants from China.

An unusual situation in Israeli precipitated Shtiglits’s journey to China. The costs of all foreign transplant operations were, at the time, assumed by medical insurance up to the customary rates in Israel. Shtiglits said that in his case the entire package had cost about $170,000 in U.S. dollars including the first-class flight with his wife and daughter, hotel costs in Shanghai, an interpreter and a personal guide for the duration of the six-week stay, the medical treatment and medication.

$170,000 is not a great amount in the organ market line – and China is among the cheapest suppliers in the field. But Shtiglits alone could scarcely have raised such a sum. Even the $65,000 for a kidney would not have been affordable for most of the 250 Israelis treated in China. Lavee decided that the reimbursements must come to an end.

He published articles in medical journals that were picked up by the Israeli press. He took part in televised discussions with Shtiglits, always on friendly terms as patient and physician, but irreconcilable on this subject. He organized a conference under the auspices of the Israeli Transplant Society. And Lavee succeeded. The Israeli transplant law, which took effect in 2008, forbids cost reimbursement for foreign transplant operations if organ purchases are involved. At the same time, the law includes provisions   to help increase Israeli citizens’ chances for getting an organ in their own country. Anyone possessing an organ donation pass receives preferential treatment from now on if he or she should need a transplant.

Lavee reports that since the law took effect not one more Israeli patient has traveled to China for a transplant. In such a small country, a specialist such as he can have a good overview of the matter. In Internet forums, Lavee is now attacked as a physician who blocked patients’ access to China.

“It’s an accusation I’m very proud of,” Lavee says.

Yet, his mission is not complete. The international problem of organ tourism continues, even as the Chinese leadership officially strives for reforms, and more needs to be done.

Since 2007, organ trade in China has been forbidden by law. This does not mean that organs can no longer be removed from prisoners – this practice continues to be tolerated. The new laws state that organs, irregardless of origin, can no longer be provided for money, for example to rich Chinese or Europeans. From time to time, publicity

generating actions occur. In August 2012, for instance, in a raid against alleged organ dealers, Chinese police arrested 137 persons including 18 doctors. Yet at the same time, websites like chinahealthtoday.com, placidway.com and novasans.com openly court transplant clients from all over the world, with ads like: “Heart transplantation overseas – Clinic managers and medical tourism facilities in China.” And the government? For the most part, it lets the hospitals that are behind these messages continue their efforts.

Organ trade is tolerated by the Chinese government. Executions supply organs and materials for transplant operations. This is frightful, but it’s not the whole story. There is another suspicion, which is even worse: Forced organ harvesting from spiritual prisoners of conscience. You might dismiss it as a fantasy by an author of thrillers, doing a remake of the shocker known as Spare Parts (Fleisch, Meat, in German), if it weren’t for the Canadian attorney David Matas and Canada’s former Secretary of State, David Kilgour.  Both men were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. With painstaking care they have been collecting facts and reports since 2006. The results of their efforts were considered by the U.S. Congress last autumn.

Matas and Kilgour’s material suggests that in China prisoners from labor or reeducation camps are also killed. Their research involved practitioners of Falun Gong, who practice Buddhist meditation techniques – people not sentenced to death but who allegedly must die because their organs are suitable for a patient.

Is this possible? It’s a fact that practitioners of Falun Gong are persecuted in China. It’s also a fact that the Falun Gong movement answers every bit of propaganda from the Chinese government with smart counter-propaganda, especially overseas. This is why the two Canadians, Matas and Kilgour, tried to keep their research independent from statements from Falun Gong practitioners. They not only collected material on Falun Gong prisoners who were subject to medical examinations while in custody, but also those who disappeared without a trace from camps, or whose bodies were found to be missing certain body parts. They also interviewed non-Chinese patients who received a kidney or liver transplant in China. They even succeeded in questioning former co-perpetrators about organ removal from Falun Gong prisoners. They documented telephone calls from investigators who presented themselves as patients or relatives and inquired at Chinese transplant centers about organs from Falun Gong practitioners.  Falun Gong practitioners are considered especially suitable donors due to their general good health, while criminal inmates are often infected with hepatitis B.

A telephone call to the Zhongshan Hospital was also tape-recorded in March 2006 – four months after Mordechai Shtiglits received his new heart there. When the caller asked whether organs from Falun Gong practitioners were also transplanted, a doctor answered, “Ours are all of that type.”

The two Canadians’ accusations are “well researched and very decisive,” says Manfred Nowak, Professor of Civil Law at the University of Vienna, and former (2010) United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. One important clue is that the strong rise in transplantation figures in China coincides with the dates of the persecution of Falun Gong     in particular.  In the name of the United Nations, Nowak called upon the Chinese government and in U.N. jargon, “made urgent appeals” for precise data on the sources of all transplanted organs. Novak reports that the People’s Republic of China always dismissed all charges as propaganda, but never rebutted them.

Afterwards the U.S. Congress considered Matas and Kilgour’s research and heard further reports.  Almost one-fourth of the members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In it they urged the State Department to make public any further information that it might possess on the “unbelievable abuse of organ transplants.”

Michael Millis, Chief of Transplantation Services at a renowned Medical School in Chicago, does not appear particularly curious about the Chinese transplant system. He says that he “deliberately did not enter into details on the prisoner donor system.” This is remarkable, since Millis has been advising the Chinese government for more than a decade on transplantation matters. He is even a friend of Vice Minister of Health Huang. According to his own words, Millis knew from the beginning that in China organs are removed from executed prisoners, although the government officially denied this during the early years of his consulting activity. However, he stated that he has never done a transplant in China. Millis emphasizes that he restricted himself to giving only speeches and lectures there. In China he wants “to develop an internationally accepted and ethically irreproachable transplantation program.” He says that he foresees a “voluntary system,” one “that eliminates incriminations.”

In Millis’ waiting room, photo albums testify to the chief’s enthusiasm for China: Son Andrew diving in China, father and son at a Chinese hospital, the whole family in a group photo with the Vice Minister of Health. Millis, his son and Huang have co-published articles together in the medical journal The Lancet.

Asked about the alleged removal of organs from incarcerated Falun Gong practitioners, Millis says: “That is not my sphere of influence. There are many things in the world that are not my focus or interest.”

Millis believes that important steps have already been taken. Since organ sales are forbidden in China, transplantation centers require a license from the Ministry of Health. However, military hospitals go their own way and are subject to scarcely any controls even by the party and the government. Meanwhile, Vice Minister of Health, Huang, calls the removal of organs from executed prisoners an “ethical problem.” It is not clear whether he is speaking here simply from conviction or if international pressure has grown too big. In any case, he does not want to completely ban the use of organs from executed prisoners. The Chinese government merely wants to reduce the dependency on donations from prisoners – in fact, the number of executions has been decreasing for the past few years. Therefore, a pilot project was started with the Chinese Red Cross to encourage voluntary organ donations.

And chief transplanter Millis? He has business interests in China. Millis is a member of the board of directors of Vital Therapies Inc. He wants to see the company put an artificial liver on the market. The so-called ELAD System is supposed to stabilize people with liver failure until their organ has regained function, or a new one can be transplanted. A pilot study for ELAD began seven years ago in China with 49 patients, and the year after that Vital Therapies applied for licensing in China. The potential market there is huge: 300,000 patients in the final stages of liver disease.

In July 2012 Michael Millis paid a visit to Berlin. The 24^th Congress of The Transplantation Society was taking place there. More than 5,000 visitors from all over the world exchanged information on the latest developments in transplantation medicine. Roland Hetzer, medical director of the German Heart Center, was also present. Falun Gong practitioners were also there and had set up a stand in front of the International Congress Center. An attractive Asian woman offered flyers to visitors. Her name was Liu Wei. Flyers, she recalled, were also what caused her much trouble back in September 2001 in China. Then it was leaflets of her Falun Gong group, which she had forgotten to conceal that led to her arrest. She spent 16 months in custody. Liu states she was beaten and tortured by sleep deprivation in the prison camp. Now, at age 40, she had been employed at the Company for Technical Cooperation (CTC) in Beijing.

One day during her time in custody Liu Wei tells of how a team of ten doctors and ten policemen entered the prison to examine her and other prisoners. “Only Falun Gong practitioners were called up,” she says. They took a blood sample from her and her internal organs were subject to ultrasound scanning. The doctors asked about previous illnesses in her family. Such examinations occurred, she says, five or six times. She never heard anything about the results.

The continuous pressure in the prison camp was too much for Liu. She made a show of starting to separate herself from Falun Gong. “I felt as if I had died,” she says. “But I was still young, and wanted to live.”

When Liu was released from detention at the end of January 2003, the CTC hired her back. A year later she moved to Germany. Today she says: “I had great luck that at that time apparently none of my organs were needed by a patient.”

While Liu distributed leaflets outside, the Congress president, Peter Neuhaus of the Charité University Clinic, opened the press conference.

He was especially pleased that 160 Chinese colleagues have found their way to Berlin. Asked by a journalist about organ removal from executed prisoners in China, Neuhaus replied, “There is no question that this was the case.” However, he said that China’s Vice Minister of Health had assured him two or three years earlier that the state wanted nothing of this kind to occur again.

The Chinese government is “seeing to” many things – including the disappearance from the Internet of reports like the one by Beijing attorney Han Bing.

Contributor: Arne Schwarz

The post ORGAN TRADE – Heart per Order appeared first on Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH).

(Remarks prepared for delivery as a poster presentation to the Transplant Nurses Association, Melbourne, Australia, November 15, 2012)

Introduction

China is the leading country in the world for transplant volume outside of the United States.  Yet, it has only a fledgling donation system for deceased donors. The numbers generated by the deceased donation system are insignificant. Its live donation system is limited in legally permissible scope, unhealthy for the donors and subject to crackdown because of fraud in attempts to fit within the narrow legal framework.

Almost all of the organs for transplants, by the admission of the Government of China, comes from prisoners.  According to research David Kilgour and I have done, in reports released July 2006 and January 2007, and in a book published November 2009 all under the name Bloody Harvest, the bulk of these organs come from imprisoned prisoners of conscience, mostly practitioners of the spiritually based set of exercises Falun Gong.

China needs to develop a numerically significant deceased organ donor volume. Even before that happens, whether that happens or not, immediately, China should stop sourcing organs from prisoners.

A. Deceased donations

The Chinese Ministry of Health, under the supervision of the Chinese Red Cross, in March 2010 set up an organ donation system in 11 provinces and municipalities.  This system is limited to donation after cardiac death.  It does not contemplate either living donations or donations after brain death only.

The newspaper Beijing Today reported in March 2011, one year after the start of the pilot project, “In Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, [one of the eleven sites], not one person has elected to be a donor.”  Liu Wenhua, a member of the Red Cross of Nanjin and one of 12 donation counsellors sent by the city government to five hospitals said “only three people in Nanjing have donated organs in the past 20 years”.  The story goes on to note: “Success was equally absent in other regions. As of last Thursday, only 37 people nationwide had registered to donate their organs.”   There is no indication how many, if any, of these 37 had died during the year, resulting in actual donations.

A bizarre publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association in July 2011 of some Communist Party propaganda about organ transplants in China, a commentary title “Regulation of Organ Transplantation in China: Difficult Exploration and Slow Advance” by Shi Bing Yi Shi and Chen Li Ping, members of the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army gives some information. The publication itself, it should be noted, violated medical ethics.

The Transplantation Society Ethics Committee Policy Statement on the Chinese Transplantation Program states: “presentations of studies involving patient data or samples from recipients of organs or tissues from executed prisoners should not be accepted.” The Editors and Associate Editors of the journal Liver Transplantation, wrote that they “have decided that original publications dealing with clinical liver transplantation outcomes submitted to this journal should explicitly exclude the use of executed prisoners or paid donors as a source of donor organs.”  Publication of the Commentary violated the spirit of these standards.

So we have to approach the Commentary published by the Journal of the American Medical Association with repugnance.  It does have nonetheless some data consistent with other data.

The Commentary observes that with the (after cardiac death) donation system set up as a pilot project in eleven cities “more than 200 individuals” volunteered to donate their organs, and that “only 63 were able to do so by the end of May 2011”.  To write, as the authors do, that only 63 “were able” to die in a certain period is, to say the least, an odd way of putting things.  One has, I think, to be a dyed in the wool member of Communist Party of China to characterize staying alive as an inability.  Yet, the Commentary does confirm the point that this donation system is statistically insignificant as a source or organs.

By March 2012, the pilot project had spread to sixteen regions and led to 546 organ donations from 207 donors.  15,379 people had registered as organ donors.  Under the pilot project, relatives of 90% of the deceased donors received subsistence benefits.  These benefits led to concern that they were disguised forms of payment for donated organs.  If this is indeed the case, we can expect a crackdown on deceased donations even before they have got off the ground.

These donations are tiny.  Nonetheless, the failed effort is worth noting.  The very failure indicates the lack of seriousness of the Communist Party/Chinese state combat in overcoming the cultural aversion to donations.  For the Party/State, increasing deceased organ donations is not a priority.

B. Living Donations

The current law allows for living donor sourcing from relatives. The State Council of the People’s Republic of China Regulations on Human Organ Transplant effective as of May 1, 2007 states

“The recipient of a living organ must be the donor’s spouse, lineal descent or collateral relative by blood within three generations, or they must prove they have developed a family like relation with the donor.

Living related donors could in theory be prisoners.  There is no express intent to exclude living related donor prisoners.

The Government of China is trying to discourage sourcing from living donors, because of the risks to the donors.  In an article in the China Daily, Chen Shi, an organ transplant expert with the institute of transplantation at Shanghai based Tongji Hospital, is quoted as saying

“Living organ donations, which can cause health risks for the donor, should always be the last resort when no suitable organ from a deceased donor is available.”

There has been fraud in the use of living relative donor exception which the authorities have been trying to control. Identities of donors have been disguised to pretend that they are relatives when they are not. This has led to a clampdown on living donor sourcing.

In Dongguan, doctor Zhou Kaizhang and seven others were prosecuted in August 2012 for this type of fraud. According to the Chinese Medical Doctor’s Association, Dr. Zhou had performed 1,000 kidney transplants.  The prosecution related to 51 kidneys transplanted between March and December 2010.

Unethical organ transplants in China are not going to be confined to live donors. There is no particular reason why abusers would restrict themselves to live donors. Abuse of deceased donor sources is similar pattern behaviour.

There is plenty of evidence of abuse in the deceased donor organ transplant system. Yet, all the news stories we see of clampdowns relate to live donors. Why is that so? Why is there no comparable clampdown on deceased donor organ transplant abuse? The answer must be that the authorities are prepared to tolerate that form of abuse. That toleration is one form of complicity in the abuse.

How many live donations are the product of the corrupt black market system which in theory China is trying to discourage?  How large will the living donor numbers be once the black market is shut down?  In light of the fakery going on, which Chinese officials admit, how do we even know that the donors survive what are supposedly live donations?

In an interview dated September 18, 2012 Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu stated that 65% of organs come from prisoners and 35% from living donors.  He added that live donations should be a last resort and not advocated.  Living donations can cause damage to healthy donors and violates the “no harm” principle of medical ethics.  Chinese medical insurance does not provide long term coverage to donors for complications from living donor transplants.

He noted that a living donor black market has emerged, inducing the poor to sell organs to wealthy people willing to pay high prices.  This practice, he added, violates the principles of health care reform.  The Ministry of Health issued a policy directive that live organ donor transplants must be approved by a provincial health department.

C. Prisoners sentenced to death

The Government of China acknowledges that organs for transplants done in China come overwhelmingly from Chinese prisoners.  The claim of the Government of China is that these prisoners who are the sources of organs harvested for transplants are convicted criminals sentenced to death and then executed who consented before execution to the use of their organs for transplants.

In July of 2005 Huang Jiefu, Chinese Deputy Minister of Health, indicated as high as 95% of organs derive from execution.   Speaking at a conference of surgeons in the southern city of Guangzhou in mid November 2006, he said: “Apart from a small portion of traffic victims, most of the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners”.   In October 2008, he said “In China, more than 90% of transplanted organs are obtained from executed prisoners”.  In March 2010, he stated that: “… over 90% of grafts from deceased donors are from executed prisoners”.

As one can see, at some points, Huang Jiefu refers to deceased donor sources and at other points to all sources.  The questions then become, how many live donors are there and how many persons are sentenced to death and then executed?  Answering the second question, how many persons are sentenced to death and then executed is not that easy, since the Chinese State and the Communist Party which runs the State consider this information to be a state secret.  We are left with external estimates.

Vice President Zhang Jun of the Supreme People’s Court in January 2011 stated that China’s Supreme People’s Court would overturn death sentences in cases where evidence was collected by illegal means. The judge said that the move was intended to limit the application of capital punishment and pressure local courts to check evidence more thoroughly.

The China National People’s Congress Standing Committee amended the Criminal Law in February 2011 to decrease the number of death penalty offences from 68 to 55.  In a second change, the death penalty could no longer be imposed on those 75 years or older at the time of trial, except for a person who has committed a murder with “exceptional cruelty”.  The new law came into effect May 1.

The Supreme People’s Court (SPC) wrote, in its annual report released in May 2011, that the death penalty should only be applied to “a very small number” of criminals who have committed “extremely serious crimes.”  Chinese courts were told to pronounce a two year suspension of execution for condemned criminals if an immediate execution is not deemed necessary; capital punishment reprieves should be granted as long as they are allowed by law.

This downward slide in the death penalty continues a previous trend.  The most significant prior development was the requirement, which took effect on January 1, 2007 that all death sentences had to be approved by the Supreme People’s Court. That change alone led to a reduction of an estimated 30% to 40% in the imposition of the death penalty.

In the abstract, from a human rights perspective, the reduction in the death penalty is good news.  The news ceases though to be good if the decrease in the death penalty leads to an increase in the killing of Falun Gong for their organs.  While the decrease in the death penalty has occurred at the same time as the increase living donor transplants, the increase in living donor transplants has come nowhere near the estimated decrease in the death penalty.

Since we do not know with precision the number of executions, another tack is trying to figure out the volume of executions which would support the volume of transplants, a figure which we have.  The volume of executions has to be a multiple of the number of transplants for a variety of reasons.

One reason is the absence of a national organ distribution system.  Individual hospitals make arrangements with individual prisons for organs.  There is substantial organ wastage in China.

A second reason is that transplanting several organs at once from the same donor contradicts the recipient information.  Everywhere else patients wait for donors.  In China, sources wait for patients.  Once the patients are ready, the sources are killed.

Given the short waiting times for transplants and the absence of national organ distribution system, sourcing several organs from the same donor would require recipient coordination.  Yet, our interviews with recipients show no such coordination.

A third reason relates to the Chinese government claim that donors consent.  While there is no proof of this consent, let us take the Chinese government claim at face value, that persons sentenced to death actually do consent.  Then consider the failure of the national donor system.

The low rate of consent is attributed to cultural aversion to donations.  Yet prisoners sentenced to death in China come from the same culture as other Chinese and would have the same cultural aversion to donation.  There is no reason to believe that their consent, if freely given, would occur at any different rate than consents outside of prison.

So we are left with a choice.  Either consents of persons in prison sentenced to death, like consents of persons outside of prison, are statistically insignificant. Or the notion of prisoner consent is just a sham, one more piece of Communist propaganda.

The prison environment and impending execution may induce consents which would otherwise not be forthcoming.  However, consents at a higher rate than the non-prison population because of these factors are indicators of the coercive impact of prison on voluntariness and not indicators of true consent.

As well, though the prison coercive environment may induce rates of nominal consent higher than that of the general population, it is implausible to suggest that the rate of nominal consent would be near or close to 100%, given the almost total reluctance of the non-prison population to consent.  Even within a prison atmosphere, there will be, in light of Chinese cultural aversion to donation, a significant proportion of prisoners who will not even nominally consent.

A fourth reason the volume of executions has to be a multiple of the number of transplants is the Criminal Procedure Code of China requirement that a convict sentenced to death to be executed seven days after sentence.  The Code allows the sentence to be executed by either injection or shooting.

The interviews David Kilgour and I have had with patients tell us that, if the source of the organ was a prisoner sentenced to death and then executed, the seven day rule was not being respected.  For, if it were, then patients would have had at most seven days notice of the availability of a transplant and would have been told that the organ would have been available at a precise date.

However, patients were not being told that.  They were told, and hospitals were advertising this on their websites, that organs would be available at any time, at the convenience of the patients.

It would be reasonable to assume that the seven day rule for execution was often, even if not universally, applied.  That would mean that many prisoners sentenced to death and then executed were not sources of organs for transplants.

Even in a country like China, where there is no rule of law, no independent judiciary, no free media, no democracy, where human rights defenders are repressed, there is some scope for the presumption of legality.  Corruption undermines the presumption, but does not replace it altogether.

For prisoners sentenced to death, where there was money to be made from transplants, the corrupt would be tempted to ignore the seven day rule.  However, it is reasonable to assume that at least some Chinese officials are not corrupt.

The fifth reason the volume of executions has to be a multiple of the number of transplants is the form of execution.  Until 2006, the majority of death penalty prisoners were executed by shooting.  In a 2006 article for USA Today, Liu Renwen, death penalty researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is quoted as saying that the “majority (of executions) are still by gunshot… But the use of injections has grown in recent years, and may have reached 40%.”

Until January 2008, execution by shooting was common.  That month Jiang Xingchang, the vice president of the Supreme People’s Court, announced to the China Daily an expansion of lethal injections to replace shootings.

Once a person is shot and killed, there is almost immediate organ deterioration.  Organ transplants can be sourced from those shot and killed, if the sourcing is done immediately.  Injection offers the luxury of time.  The bulk of the anecdotal evidence we have, except for the period when China began transplants, is that organ sources are injected and not shot.  Many of those executed by shooting, because of the practical reality of immediate organ deterioration and the inability to organize on the spot harvesting, are not organ sources.

A sixth reason is the need for blood type and ideally tissue type compatibility between the donor and the recipient.  Not every donor is available as a source for every patient.  Moreover, since sourcing is local, each detention centre with ties to a local hospital has to have its own group of prisoners waiting for execution, its own organ donor bank.  The notion that at any one time at all major prisons in China there are large volumes of prisoners sentenced to death and awaiting execution runs contrary to observed experience.

Then UN Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak, on his visit to China in November 2005, found in prisons persons sentenced to death at first instance awaiting appeal, but none sentenced to death awaiting execution.  When he asked to see such prisoners, he was told that there were none, because all prisoners sentenced to death whose appeals had been exhausted were executed immediately.

A seventh reason the volume of executions has to be a multiple of the number of transplants is blood disease which renders transplantation unsuitable.  The most common such blood disease is hepatitis B, which is endemic in China.   One study estimated 50 to 60 % of the Chinese population carries hepatitis B markers.   Another study focused on four Chinese cities found the infection rate to be 62.6%.

If we look just at this last reason alone we would need 267 prisoners for every 100 organ recipients.  If we put the other factors into the mix, we are looking at more like a factor of ten to one.  That is to say, 10,000 organ transplants a year, if the sourcing is solely prisoners sentenced to death and then executed, would require something in the order of 100,000 executions a year.

One has, of course, to take into account the increased sourcing from living organ donors. On the other side of the ledger are the death penalty developments which have cut down substantially on executions.

The bottom line is that the volume of prisoners sentenced to death and then executed necessary to sustain the current rate of transplantation is so out of whack with every death penalty estimate in China, by far, as well as Chinese death penalty execution procedures that organ sourcing, preponderantly, must be coming from other sources than prisoners sentenced to death and then executed.  And what would those other sources be?

D. Prisoners of conscience

David Kilgour and I in a report published first in July 2006 and then January 2007 concluded that there were 41,500 transplants in the six year period 2000 to 2005 where the only explanation for the sourcing was Falun Gong practitioners.  In November 2009 in our book Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for their Organs concluded that since our report, matters have become worse, that there has been an increase in sourcing of organs from Falun Gong practitioners.

Falun Gong is a set of exercises with a spiritual foundation banned by the Communist Party and then the Government of China in 1999 out of jealousy at its popularity and fear that its spirituality, rooted in ancient Chinese traditions, would undermine the ideological supremacy of Western imported Communism. After the banning, Falun Gong practitioners were arrested in the hundreds of thousands.  Those who recanted spontaneously or after torture were released.

Those who refused to recant disappeared into what the Government of China euphemistically calls re-education through labour camps. These camps are both arbitrary detention slave labour camps and vast live organ donor banks.  The Laogai Research Foundation estimated in 2008 that the number in the camps then currently detained were between 500,000 and two million souls.

David Kilgour and I drew the figure of 41,500 by looking at volumes of transplants and volumes of executions before and after the persecution of Falun Gong began.  After the persecution of Falun Gong began transplant volumes shot up, but executions remained steady. So we attributed the difference in transplant sources to Falun Gong. After the release of the second version of our report and before the publication of our book, executions decreased and transplant volumes, after an initial dip, returned to traditional levels.  So we concluded that sourcing from Falun Gong practitioners had increased.

A development since the publication of Bloody Harvest has been the work of Ethan Gutmann and Jaya Gibson.  Their work, first announced in June 2010 and elaborated in a chapter in the recently published book State Organs: Transplant abuse in China, which Torsten Trey and I have co-edited, tells us that the killing of innocents for their organs has spread from Falun Gong to Tibetans, Eastern Lightning house Christians and Uighurs.  Gutmann and Gibson glean this information from interviewing members of these victim groups who got out of Chinese detention centres and then out of China.  Those interviewed tell them of blood testing and organ examination of the sort that Falun Gong practitioners endured.

This phenomenon means we cannot ascribe the difference between transplant volumes and death penalty volumes to Falun Gong practitioners alone.  Some of the sources will be these other victim groups.

Our figure of 41,500 was generated by comparing transplant volumes before and after the persecution of Falun Gong began.  The most reliable death penalty statistics came from Amnesty International.  Though they were almost certainly an underestimate because based on media reports alone, we considered them reliable indicators of multi-year trends, if not yearly totals.  Multi-year averages of executions, according to Amnesty International figures, remained constant before and after the persecution of Falun Gong.  The difference between transplant volumes before and after the persecution of Falun Gong could then reasonably be attributed to Falun Gong sourcing.

Amnesty International has stopped publishing death penalty statistics.  It used to provide a death penalty log, setting out individual cases.  The last log, published in 2002 set out executions for 2000.  Amnesty International continued with yearly estimates after 2002 of persons sentenced to death and then executed, but its last statistics, for 2008 of 1,718 executions, was published in our book.  There are no statistics for 2009 or 2010.  The organization gave no explanation for stopping either the log or the statistics.

The loss of information is regrettable. The log and the statistics were based on media reports. While not every execution was publicly reported and therefore the log and statistics gave a number lower than total executions, the figures were useful for indicating trends and characteristics.  One could see from the log and statistics which Amnesty International compiled the breakdowns, for instance, by crime, region and gender.  Amnesty International should re-establish its log and statistical reporting.

Tibetans, Uighurs and Eastern Lightning house Christians, sources Ethan Gutmann and Jaya Gibson have identified, are unlikely to come anywhere near the necessary volume.  Uighurs and Tibetans are detained in specific geographical locations in China, not throughout China.  Eastern Lightning house Christians suffer nowhere near the rate of detention nor extremes of vilification of Falun Gong.  Falun Gong practitioner prisoners remain the most plausible source for the bulk of transplants in China.

The onus lies on the Government of China to provide the numbers.  The current situation creates a presumption of wrongdoing beyond the sourcing of organs from prisoners sentenced to death and then executed.

Organ transplant sourcing must be transparent and traceable.  The Government of China admits that organs are sourced predominantly from prisoners.  What then is it trying to hide by not providing numbers?  One compelling answer is that it is trying to hide the killing of Falun Gong and other prisoners of conscience for their organs.

The claim that the sources have consented, as unpersuasive as it is for prisoners sentenced to death, would be impossible for innocent sources.  The killing of innocents for their organs is murder.  The killing of prisoners of conscience for their organs is a crime against humanity.

Criminals against humanity typically make every effort to cover up their crimes.  The secrecy we see about numbers looks to be just that, a cover up of a crime against humanity.

Conclusion

Replacing the prisoner source of organs for transplants with a voluntary deceased donor source is the stated goal of the Government of China.  Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu in March this year said that China plans to abolish the sourcing of organs from prisoners within five years.  Wang Haibo, a Chinese health official appointed to design an organ allocation system, said earlier this month (November 2012), that China will start phasing out is reliance on prisoners for organs early next year.

There are cultural, political and financial obstacles to increasing deceased donations.   The killing in China of prisoners for their organs should stop immediately and not await an increase in deceased donations.

While increasing voluntary deceased donations should be a priority, increased the sourcing of organs from the deceased who are not prisoners does not, on its own, alleviate concern for abuse.  The World Health Organization Guiding Principle 11 requires transparency of sources, open to scrutiny, while ensuring that personal anonymity of donors and recipients are protected.  How can we know that the deceased outside prison who are the sources of organs acted voluntarily in signing over their organs?  In a system without transparency, accountability and the rule of law, the answer is that we have no way of knowing.

It is impossible to run an island of ethical organ donation in a raging sea of human rights abuses.  The infrastructure necessary to ensure respect for organ donation ethics simply does not exist.

Ending organ transplant abuse in China and having a functioning organ donation system can not be done by a focus on the organ sourcing system in isolation.  We will see transparent, accountable, ethical organ sourcing in China only when we see the rule of law in China.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

David Matas is an international human rights lawyer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

The post Organ Donation in China – Presentation by David Matas in Melbourne, Australia, on November 15, 2012 appeared first on Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH).

By David Matas

American Transplant Congress, Philadelphia, April 30, 2011

The Government of China acknowledges that organs for transplants done in China come overwhelmingly from Chinese prisoners.  The claim of the Government of China is that these prisoners who are the sources of organs harvested for transplants are convicted criminals sentenced to death and then executed who consented before execution to the use of their organs for transplants.

In July of 2005 Huang Jiefu, Chinese Deputy Minister of Health, indicated as high as 95% of organs derive from execution[1].   Speaking at a conference of surgeons in the southern city of Guangzhou in mid‑November 2006, he said: “Apart from a small portion of traffic victims, most of the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners”[2].   In October 2008, he said “In China, more than 90% of transplanted organs are obtained from executed prisoners”[3].  In March 2010, he stated that: “… over 90% of grafts from deceased donors are from executed prisoners”[4].

I and David Kilgour, in a study released in report form in July 2006 and then January 2007[5] and in book form in November 2009 under the titleBloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for their Organs, concluded that the bulk of prisoners who are the source of organs for transplants are Falun Gong practitioners who do not consent, who are killed by the organ harvesting operation and who are not sentenced to death.

Falun Gong is a set of exercises with a spiritual foundation banned by the Communist Party and then the Government of China in 1999. After the banning, Falun Gong practitioners were arrested in the hundreds of thousands.  Those who recanted spontaneously or after  torture were released.

Those who refused to recant disappeared into what the Government of China euphemistically calls re‑education through labour camps. These camps are in reality arbitrary detention slave labour camps.  The Laogai Research Foundation estimated in 2008 that the number in the camps then currently detained was between 500,000 and two million souls[6].

The Government of China acknowledges that sourcing of organs from prisoners is wrong and has committed itself eventually to ending the practice.   Mr. Huang, at the time of the announcement of an organ donor pilot project in August 2009, stated that executed prisoners “are definitely not a proper source for organ transplants”[7].   This acknowledgement stands regardless what position one takes in the debate between the Government of China, on the one hand, and me and David Kilgour, on the other hand, about which prisoners are sources of organs for transplants.

I.  Sales

Organ transplant anti‑rejection drug trials and sales in China are conducted by multi‑national pharmaceutical companies.   In 1994 Human Rights Watch reported:

“From 1983 onwards, two unrelated factors combined to give a major boost to the [organ transplant] program: first, the commencement of a series of “crackdown on crime” (yan‑da) campaigns, held every year since 1983, which greatly increased the number of criminals sentenced to death and hence the potential supply of transplantable organs; and second, the introduction to China of Cyclosporine A, an acknowledged “wonder drug” which greatly raised the success rate in transplant operations. …. Cyclosporine A (CsA), an immunosuppressive agent which inhibits the body’s natural tendency to reject foreign body tissue, was introduced into China in the mid‑1980s, apparently by the Swiss company Sandoz [now Novartis]. … The vast majority of kidney transplant patients in China now receive expensive follow‑up treatment involving CsA therapy.”[8]

The drug company Roche in 2006 opened a factory in Shanghai producing the immunosuppressive drug CellCept.  Asked by a newspaper why Roche produces this particular drug in China the former Roche CEO and present Chairman of the Board of Directors Franz Humer:

“… gave as reason that, contrary to Japan, in China there were no ethical or cultural stoppages for transplant medicine”[9]

Canadian company Isotechnika and Chinese company 3SBio in 2010 entered into a cooperation contract on the immunosuppressive drug voclosporin. The drug was developed by Isotechnika.  A co-founder of 3SBio, Jing Lou, recently became a board member of Isotechnika[10].

Bloomberg Businessweek reported on August 25, 2010:

“3SBio…, a China‑based biotechnology firm, and Isotechnika Pharma…, a Canadian biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of immune modulating therapeutics, said they have signed a development and commercialization agreement for voclosporin, a next generation calcineurin inhibitor being developed for use in the prevention of organ rejection following transplantation and the treatment of autoimmune diseases.

Under the terms of the agreement, Isotechnika will grant 3SBio exclusive rights to all transplant and autoimmune indications of voclosporin in China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan,….

3SBio will be responsible for the clinical development, registration and commercialization of voclosporin in China.  Isotechnika will provide, under separate agreement, commercial supply to 3SBio on a cost‑plus basis.

Isotechnika will receive an upfront non‑refundable licensing payment of $1.5 million.  Isotechnika will also receive ongoing royalties based on sales of voclosporin by 3SBio…. 3SBio will also nominate one member to Isotechnika’s board of directors….”[11]

In 2008, the pharmaceutical company Roche decided against invoking a contract option to cooperate with Isotechnika in marketing the drug for transplants[12]. Isotechnika decided to go ahead without an international partner, in cooperation with the Chinese company 3SBio.

The cooperation contract makes Isotechnika complicit in the unethical organ transplantation system of China.  Immunosuppressive drugs are used on organ transplant patients to prevent rejection of transplanted organs. The contract, by bringing the drug to the Chinese market, would facilitate organ transplantations in China.

II. Trials

A. Companies[13]

i) Pfizer

Wyeth (today Pfizer) in June 2004 started a clinical drug trial in China with 122 transplanted kidneys. This trial is complete.  Pfizer began in November 2010 to recruit patients for a new transplant trial in China; the recruiting today continues[14].

ii) Novartis

Novartis did a kidney trial from January 2005 to June 2006 with 300 participants[15].

iii) Roche

Roche in 2006 started a trial with 36 transplanted hearts. That trial is now complete.

Roche in April 2008 started a trial with about 90 transplanted livers and in September 2008 with about 210 transplanted kidneys.  These two Roche trials were supposed to be finished in 2010 but were initially prolonged to August 2011. Immediately after criticism of these trials at its 2011 general meeting, Roche reported in March 2011 that it finished its kidney trial half a year ahead of the scheduled date and stopped the recruiting for the liver trial[16].

Roche reported in January 2010 to have stopped recruiting at all locations for one month and reported in February 2010 to have restarted recruiting. February 2010 was the month when the Oriental Organ Transplant Center was chosen as a new trial location[17].

Swiss based researcher Arne Schwarz in September 2009 wrote Roche asking them what was the source of the transplanted organs on which they were conducting clinical trials.  They wrote back:

“Roche is not in charge of the supply of organs.  Anonymity and privacy of donor data are protected by law. Roche is not entitled to know the source of transplanted organs.”

iv) Astellas

Astellas did a liver transplant trial from March 2007 to March 2009 with 42 participants. Astellas started a trial in July 2007 with  240 transplanted kidneys and in January 2008 with 172 transplanted livers, all now completed[18].

The Astellas immunosuppressive drug Prograf has been tested since 2009 through Chinese transplant trials.  300 patients are still being recruited in eight medical centres[19]. The recruiter is The Second Artillery General Hospital in Beijing.  Is Astellas involved in this study by delivering the drugs for free, something which often occurs with such studies?

B. Trial locations organ sources

One trail of evidence on which David Kilgour and I relied was telephone calls of Mandarin speaking investigators.  These investigators telephoned a number of hospitals and transplant doctors to ask about transplants. The callers presented themselves as potential recipients or relatives of potential recipients. Phone numbers were obtained from the internet. These calls resulted in a number of admissions that Falun Gong practitioners are the sources of organ transplants.

i) Shanghai

This is an excerpt of the transcript of the call made by caller M to Shanghai Jiaotong University Hospital’s Liver Transplant Centre on 16 March 2006:

“M: I want to know how long [the patients] have to wait [for a liver transplant].

Dr. Dai: The supply of organs we have, we have every day. We do them every day.

M: We want fresh, alive ones.

Dr. Dai: They are all alive, all alive…

M: How many [liver transplants] have you done?

Dr. Dai: We have done 400 to 500 cases… Your major job is to come, prepare the money, enough money, and come.

M: How much is it?

Dr. Dai: If everything goes smoothly, it’s about RMB 150,000… RMB 200,000.

M: How long do I have to wait?

Dr. Dai: I need to check your blood type… If you come today, I may do it for you within one week.

M: I heard some come from those who practise Falun Gong, those who are very healthy.

Dr. Dai: Yes, we have. I can’t talk clearly to you over the phone.

M: If you can find me this type, I am coming very soon.

Dr. Dai: It’s ok. Please come.

M: … What is your last name?…

Dr. Dai: I’m Doctor Dai.[20]”

a) Roche

International registries for clinical trials[21] show that drug company Hoffmann‑La Roche or Roche was engaged since 2008 in research in transplanted livers and kidneys in 19 hospitals in China[22].  For research location, the registries give Chinese zip codes only.

The China Liver Transplant Registry lists contact information of hospitals where liver transplants are being done[23].   Most of the hospitals in which Roche is doing its research can be identified because, for most of the Roche Zip codes, there is only one Chinese liver transplant registry hospital.

One of the Roche Zip codes is 200080[24].  For Zip code 200080, the only China Liver Transplant Registry hospital is the Shanghai Jiaotong University Hospital’s Liver Transplant Centre. It is also called Affiliated No. 1 People’s Hospital at Jiaotong University in Shanghai and the Shanghai First People’s Hospital[25]. This is the place where the investigator talked to Dr. Dai.  The phone number the investigator called is the same as the phone number of the hospital in the China Liver Transplant Registry[26].

So there is compelling evidence that Roche is engaged in clinical trials in a hospital in Shanghai which is sourcing organs from Falun Gong practitioners.  Roche itself gives no indication of the source of organs.

b) Novartis

For the 2005-2006 trial, Novartis gave hospital names for the trial locations. One location was Shanghai No 1 Hospital, Shanghai. “Shanghai No 1 Hospital” must mean “Shanghai First People’s Hospital” of China Liver Transplant Registry where the phone call with Dr. Dai was recorded. No other No 1 Hospital in Shanghai doing transplants could be found.

c) Astellas

The Second Artillery General Hospital in Beijing which is running the trial for the Astellas drug Prograf, mentioned earlier, has as a trial location Shanghai First People’s Hospital with the ZIP code 200080[27]. This, again, is the hospital where we have the tape recording of Dr. Dai.

d) Wyeth/Pfizer

An article in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology discusses the Wyeth/Pfizer kidney trial with 122 subjects mentioned earlier in this talk and says: “The source of organs was mostly cadavers (93%).”  One trial location listed in the article is “Shanghai No.1 People’s Hospital of Jiaotong University, Shanghai”[28]. Again, this is the hospital where Dr. Dai was recorded.

ii) Tianjin

For the Oriental Organ Transplant Center in Tianjin also called Tianjin Number 1 Central Hospital, our book Bloody Harvest presents a transcribed/translated recording of a conversation of investigator N with hospital director Song Wenli.  This is an excerpt from the conversation:

“Caller N: Hi. Is this Tianjin first central hospital’s Director Song?

Director Song: Yes, please speak.”

The caller tells Dr. Song that her aunt needs a transplant badly and that a friend of the aunt had got a transplant elsewhere.

“Caller N: Her [the aunt’s friend’s] doctor told her that the source of the kidney is very good as she [the organ supplier] practiced qigong.

Director Song: What type of qigong?

N: Falun Gong, because people who practice Falun Gong have good health.

Song: Of course. We have the same situation here. We also have these so‑called supplier bodies that are still breathing or still have a heartbeat. We also have them, of course. Um, we might have some of this type. So far this year, we’ve probably had more than ten kidneys of this kind.

N: More than ten of this kind of kidney? You mean live bodies?

Song: Yes, it is so.”[29]

Song Wenli is still working at the hospital according to his profile at the hospital website[30]. The mobile phone number the investigator called belongs to a member of the Oriental hospital transplant center[31].

The Oriental Organ Transplant Center is one of the largest transplant centers in China with nearly 1,000 transplants in 2005[32].  A doctor at a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Hospital, Wang Guoqui, testfied at the United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights in June 2001 that live organ harvesting was practised in Tianjin[33]. The hospital is close to the Banqiao Women’s Labor Camp where many Falun Gong practitioners have been badly mistreated[34].

a) Roche

Roche added, in January 2010, a liver trial location at Tianjiin and started recruiting there a month later[35]. The ZIP code for the trial is shown as 300192[36].  The China Liver Transplant Registry shows that the ZIP code 300192 belongs to Tianjin No. 1 Central Hospital also called Oriental Organ Transplant Center. So there appear to be two hospitals at which Roche is doing trials where there was compelling evidence of reliance on Falun Gong organs.

b) Astellas

The company specifies cities as trial locations. One location is Tianjin.  Both the Astellas trial with 42 subjects and the Astellas trial with 172 subjects took place in Tianjin[37].

In the China Liver Transplant Registry there is only one hospital in Tianjin licensed for liver transplants, The Oriental Organ Transplant Centre, the hospital from which we have the recording of Director Song Wenli. So Astellas also appears to have engaged in transplant trials at two transplant centres for which there is compelling evidence of use of organs of Falun Gong practitioners.

iii) Summary

All four companies have suspicious trial locations: Shanghai No.1 People’s Hospital of Jiaotong University, the source of the phone call with Dr. Dai, appears to have been a trial location for Roche, Astellas, Novartis, and Wyeth/Pfizer and for the Second Artillery General Hospital in Beijing, which has been testing the Astellas drug Prograf. The Oriental Organ Transplant Center Tianjin, the source of the phone call with director Song Wenli, appears to have been a trial location for Roche and Astellas.

III. Transplant tourism

A website offers to foreigners transplants at The Tianjin Oriental Organ Transplant Center. The website of the Omar Health Care Service:

“We, Omar Healthcare Service (OHS), are here to assist the overseas patients who intend to be treated in China by those world‑famous specialists, or who are seeking a help of getting a kidney, liver or heart transplant in China. Please browse through our website to find out more information about the service we provide and contact us for more customized items. We are cooperating directly, as a service provider, with the most qualified two hospitals concerning transplantation in China:

Tianjin First Central Hospital

International Cardiovascular Hospital

Those above‑mentioned hospitals of which the First Central is famous for liver & kidney treatment/transplant while the International Cardiovascular for heart, with the license issued by the Ministry of National Health of the People’s Republic of China, are surely where the dying‑patients reborn.”[38]

After clicking on “Organ transplant in China”, you see this:

“As a sector of modern medical system, Chinese doctors and scientists in line with organ transplantation have been winning satisfactory achievements worldwide recognized. More and more dying patients from all directions of the world are coming to China to seek for rebirth, of which most are survived successfully. It is true that the source of organ supply are fairly abundant in China compared with that in western countries (italics added), but the excellent skill in performing such demanding operations is no doubt an important factor for them to make decisions before leaving home for China.”[39]

The website languages are English and Arabic.

One and a half million Chinese need transplants.  The Chinese Ministry of Health, under the supervision of the Chinese Red Cross, in March 2010 set up an organ donation system in 11 provinces and municipalities.

The newspaper Beijing Today reported in March 2011, one year later, “In Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, [one of the eleven sites], the not one person has elected to be a donor.”  Liu Wenhua, a member of the Red Cross of Nanjin and one of 12 donation counselors sent by the city government to five hospitals said “only three people in Nanjing have donated organs in the past 20 years”.  The story goes on to note: “Success was equally absent in other regions. As of last Thursday, only 37 people nationwide had registered to donate their organs.”[40]

Chinese patients are supposedly given priority access to organ transplants, taking precedence over foreigners.  The Ministry of Health of the Government of China announced that change on June 26, 2007[41].  Yet, the website posting of the Omar Health Care Service suggests the contrary. Like much else in China, what the Chinese Government/Communist Party says and what the Government/Party does about transplant tourism and ending organ transplant abuse diverge considerably.

IV. Standards

World Health Organization principle 11 for organ transplantation says that donation of organs “…must be transparent and open to scrutiny, while ensuring that the personal anonymity and privacy of donors and recipients are always protected.”  Principle 10 requires traceability of organs to the donor[42].

Some country transplantation laws allow communication of the contents of medical records to the authorities, including to foreign authorities and international organizations, in order to bring to light illegal organ trafficking or other grave infringements of its transplantation laws. Every country’s transplantation laws should allow this form of disclosure and traceability. The Swiss transplantation law, for example, gives its Federal Council power to enact regulations to that effect[43].

An article in the 2011 edition of the American Journal of Transplantation states:

“Pharmaceutical companies must ensure that no executed prisoners are the sources of organs used in their studies”[44]

The word “must” indicates that the onus rests on the pharmaceutical companies.  The word “ensure” indicates that what counts is the result, not just the effort.

V. Reaction

The Swiss NGOs Declaration of Berne and Greenpeace Switzerland in January 2010 gave the Public Eye Swiss Award 2010 for irresponsible company practices to Roche. Roche also got the Public Eye People’s Award for irresponsible company practices by an internet vote of 5,723 people worldwide.  The awards were granted for conducting research on transplant patients in China without knowing the origin of the organs donated[45].

Amnesty International in August 2010 issued an appeal which stated:

“Companies should exercise due diligence to ensure that they are not directly or indirectly implicated in the taking or use of organs from executed prisoners.”

It called on pharmaceutical companies

“to collectively:

•      declare their commitment to respecting human rights;

•      condemn the practice of sourcing organs from executed prisoners; and

•      undertake to carry out human rights due diligence, including throughout their value chains, so as to become aware of, prevent and address adverse human rights impacts, and to ensure that they do not directly or indirectly assist, encourage or support the sourcing of organs from executed prisoners.”[46]

Drug company Novartis stated in August 2010 that it was observing a moratorium for its clinical immunosuppressive drug trials in China. Its spokesman, Satoshi Sugimoto, declared that Novartis supported the public statement of Amnesty International and would work on bringing together the stakeholders for the next steps.[47]

The NGO Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting in August 2010 made this statement:

“…in order to assure ethically sustainable research, companies should refrain from performing clinical trials in which the source of the transplanted organs is due to a general lack of transparency in the organ donation system commonly not traceable, or where the organ procurement goes along with an increased risk that the involved transplants are not procured by ethical means.

DAFOH appeals to … refrain from using transplants that might be legally, but not ethically acceptable.

… approximately 60‑90% of the transplantations performed in China use organs that stem from executed prisoners, and we add, might include organs that stem from Falun Gong practitioners whose organs are forcibly harvested without consent while still alive. This goes along with a high likelihood that transplants used in clinical trials in transplantation medicine in China are actually procured in a way that is banned by ethical standards of all major medical organizations.

For this reason, DAFOH adds in its appeal to research and pharmaceutical companies to refrain from performing clinical trials in transplant medicine in the People’s Republic of China.”[48]

The Dutch bank Triodo disinvested from Roche stating in September 2010:

“Recent controversies show that Roche’s clinical trials with transplanted organs in China do not meet Triodos criteria for selection….in January this year, Roche received the Public Eye Award that is sponsored by the Berne Declaration and Greenpeace… Naturally, we decided to investigate the case… Roche received the award because of its clinical trials in China for the drug CellCept, which prevents the rejection of transplanted organs. Since a large part of transplanted organs in China originate from executed prisoners and Roche does not verify the origins of the organs in its China‑based trials, its position is questionable.

Roche’s response to our enquiries pointed out that the responsibility for obtaining organs lies with the trial centres that perform the transplants. The company claims it is not entitled in any country to learn where the transplanted organs originate from. Up to 90 percent of all transplanted organs in China come from executed prisoners… even when a prisoner supposedly consents to an organ donation, such consent while imprisoned cannot be considered of free will. Consultations with experts and NGO’s such as Amnesty International and Dutch based medical industry watchdog Wemos all pointed in the same direction: Roche does not take full responsibility for its clinical trials in China. In our final assessment we balanced the gathered information and concluded that Roche’s approach to clinical trials in China is not acceptable. The company’s size and influence warrant a much clearer position on the origin of transplanted organs. Since the company no longer meets our human rights minimum standard, it has been excluded from the Triodos sustainable investment universe and will be removed from all Triodos investments within the short term.”[49]

The Dutch ASN bank followed suit.  According to information posted on the internet in March 2011, they removed Roche from their portfolio because of its clinical transplant trials in China[50].

Dr. Eric J. Goldberg, chief medical research director of an international clinical pharmaceutical research corporation was given an invitation to conduct clinical research trials in China. He refused the request and persuaded his employer to locate another country to conduct the research. He has attempted to sway other pharmaceutical companies to do the same[51].

VI. Remedies

Both sales of anti‑rejection drugs to China and clinical trials of anti‑rejection drugs in China are problematic.  The sale of anti‑rejection drugs facilitates an illicit transplant industry.  Clinical trials have been performed on patients who may have received organs from improper sources.

Pharmaceutical companies should not be participating in clinical trials in China unless they are satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that that the organs transplanted to the patients on whom the drugs are used are received from a proper source.  Doctors should not participate in clinical trials in China unless the doctors themselves ensure beyond a reasonable doubt that the organs transplanted to the patients on whom the trials are conducted are received from a proper source. Regulatory authorities should not approve drugs based on data from clinical trials in China.

Sales though present a more nuanced issue.  Some sales keep alive patients who have already received organs from improper sources. Drugs should be provided to patients who might die without them.  Killing patients who received organs from improper sources is not an answer to unethical organ sourcing.

Yet, anti-rejection drugs should not be so freely available that they induce further improper organ sourcing.  One has to distinguish between past transplants and future transplants.  Drug companies should announce a policy that they would sell anti-rejection drugs to existing patients but not to future patients.

The question then becomes how to implement such a policy.  If tracing donors and patients were possible, implementation would be easy. However, the Chinese transplantation system does not have the transparency which makes that sort of tracing possible.

A simpler way of making the distinction between past and future transplants would be to freeze sales at the level necessary to meet the needs of the existing patient volume at the time of the freeze.  That sort of freeze may allow for some slippage, because patients who die and no longer need the drugs could be replaced by new ones.  Nonetheless, the freeze would curtail abuse and put the drug companies on record as combatting it.

We should not turn a blind eye to ethical abuse. Given the high proportion of organs sourced from prisoners, many if not most of the organs used in clinical trials likely came from prisoners. Until China respects the World Health Organization principle that organ donations are to be transparent, traceable and open to scrutiny, neither pharmaceutical companies nor transplant professionals should cooperate in Chinese transplantation activities.

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

David Matas is an international human rights lawyer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

_________________________________________________________________

[1]

The Congressional Executive Commission on China Annual Report 2006, p. 59, note 224, p.201: “Organ Transplants: A Zone of Accelerated Regulation” Caijing Magazine (Online), 28 November 05.

[2]

https://news3.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-11/16/content_5335427.htm

[3]

https://press.thelancet.com/chinaorgan.pdf

[4]

“Tomorrow’s Organ Transplantation Program in China”.

Presentation delivered at the Madrid Conference on Organ Donation and Transplantation, Madrid 2010, by Prof. Huang Jiefu, Vice Minister of Health, P.R.C.

[5]

At  www.organharvestinvestigation.net

[6]

Laogai Handbook 2007-2008 page 18 at:

https://laogai.org/system/files/u1/handbook2008-all.pdf

[7]

“China’s Organ Reforms”, China Daily, August 26, 2009.

[8]

https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1994/china1/china_948.htm#N_1_

[9]

https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/transplantationsbank‑china%3B985748

[10]

https://www.isotechnika.com/corporate/board_of_directors/ritchie/

[11]

https://www.isotechnika.com/for_investors/media_coverage/?article_id=397&back=%2F

[12]

Arne Schwarz, “Why is the cooperation contract on the immunosuppressive drug voclosporin between Canadian company Isotechnika and Chinese company 3SBio immoral and contrary to public policy?” September 2, 2010.

[13]

The citations for the trials of the companies are set out in the speech of Arne Schwarz “Abusive Organ Transplantations and Responsibilities of the International Pharmaceutical Companies in China”, September 30, 2010.

[14]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2732940/ ;

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00257387?term=NCT00257387&rank=1 ;  

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01236378?term=pfizer+china+transplant&rank=1;

[15]

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00149903?term=novartis+china+kidney&rank=1

[16]

https://www.roche‑trials.com/trialDetailsGet.action?studyNumber=ML20055

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00758602?term=roche+kidney+china&rank=1

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00717314?term=roche+liver+china&rank=1

Go to “History of Changes” at these links.

[17]

https://clinicaltrials.gov/archive/NCT00717314/2010_01_15/changes

https://clinicaltrials.gov/archive/NCT00717314/2010_02_16/changes

[18]

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00459719?term=NCT00459719&rank=1

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00481819?term=NCT00481819&rank=1

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00619398?term=NCT00619398&rank=1

[19]

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00935298

[20]

The original recording can be found at:

https://www.zhuichaguoji.org/en/index2.php?option=content&task=view&id=168&pop=1&page=0 .

The phone number called was 011862163240090.  The English translation is Telephone Message 4.  For Bloody Harvest, David Kilgour and I retranslated the original Chinese rather than rely on the translation on the web and identified different callers with different initials.

[21]

https://clinicaltrials.gov;

https://centerwatch.com

(up to February 2010).

[22]

Arne Schwarz, “Chinese hospitals presumably used by Hoffmann-La Roche for transplantation trials” April 30, 2009.

[23]

https://cltr.org/en/transplantcenters.jsp

Go to “English” and then “Transplant centers”.

[24]

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00717314?term=200080+AND+shanghai+AND+Roche&rank=2

[25]

https://www.shanghaiguide.org/Shanghai-First-People-s-Hospital-2046.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Jiao_Tong_University.

The website given at Chinese Liver Transplant Registry for Shanghai First People’s Hospital is that of the Liver Transplant Centre where the correct full name is found with Google translate: Shanghai Jiaotong University Affiliated First People’s Hospital liver transplant center.

[26]

https://www.zhuichaguoji.org/en/index2.php?option=content&task=view&id=168&pop=1&page=0

[27]

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00935298?term=second+artillery&rank=1

[28]

Zheng Jiao, Xiao‑jin Shi, Zhong‑dong Li, and Ming‑kang Zhong “Population pharmacokinetics of sirolimus in de novo Chinese adult renal transplant patients” v.68(1); Jul 2009.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2732940/

[29]

https://www.zhuichaguoji.org/en/index2.php?option=content&task=view&id=168&pop=1&page=0 .

Telephone message 1.  See earlier footnote about this website.

[30]

https://www.tj-fch.com/cn/zhuanjia_detail.asp?id=200

with Google translation:

https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=www.tj-fch.com%2Fcn%2Fzhuanjia_detail.asp%3Fid=200

[31]

Director of renal transplantation: Song Zhuren Mobile: 13920128990

https://www.hbvhbv.com/forum/thread-554939-1-1.html

This text can be found by scrolling down in the Google translation of this page:

https://translate.google.de/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF‑8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=zh‑CN&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hbvhbv.com%2Fforum%2Fthread‑554939‑1‑1.html

[32]

Jonathan Watts “China bans buying and selling of human organs” The Guardian, 29 March 2006.  

https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/29/china.jonathanwatts

[33]

https://www.consciencelaws.org/repression/repression-029.html

[34]

https://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2004/9/30/52979.html

[35]

https://clinicaltrials.gov/archive/NCT00717314/2010_02_16/changes

[36]

https://clinicaltrials.gov/archive/NCT00717314/2010_01_15/changes

[37]

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00459719?term=NCT00459719&rank=1; 

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00619398?term=NCT00619398&rank=1

[38]

https://cntransplant.com/

[39]

https://cntransplant.com/index1.htm

[40]

Han Manman “Organ donor pilot a failure after one year”

March 18, 2011.

https://www.beijingtoday.com.cn/feature/organ-donor-pilot-a-failure-after-one-year

[41]

Jim Warren China moving rapidly to change transplant system Transplant News, September 2007.

[42]

https://www.who.int/transplantation/Guiding_PrinciplesTransplantation_WHA63.22en.pdf

[43]

See:

https://www.admin.ch/ch/f/rs/8/810.21.fr.pdf  ; Article 60.

[44]

G.M. Danovitch, M.E. Shapiro, and J. Lavee “The Use of Executed Prisoners as Sources of Organ Transplants in China Must Stop” Volume 11 pages 426‑428.

[45]

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/specials/World_economic_forum/Roche_vilified_in_Davos_for_transplant_drug.html?cid=8185350

[46]

https://www.amnesty.ch/de/themen/wirtschaft-menschenrechte/dok/2010/amnesty-international-calls-for-the-end-to-the-use-of-organs-from-executed-prisoners

[47]

“Appel à clarifier les prélèvements d’organes sur des prisonniers en Chine” Frédéric Koller/Le Temps:

https://www.infosud.org/spip.php?article8664

[48]

DAFOH Statement on Clinical Trials that involve Transplants of unknown Origin, August 12, 2010:

https://dafoh.org/Statement_Clinical_Trial.php

[49]

Pharmaceutical giant removed from investment universe

23‑09‑2010:

https://www.triodos.com/en/about-triodos-bank/news/newsletters/newsletter-sustainability-research/pharmaceutical-company/

[50]

https://www.asnbank.nl/index.asp?nid=9415 (in Dutch). Click under the header “Afgekeurd/ verwijderd” the internal link “Roche”.

[51]

Robin Kemker, “Organ Transplant Expert Refuses China’s Invitation”, Epoch Times Dec 29, 2010:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china/organ-transplant-expert-refuses-chinas-invitation-48285.html

The post Presentation of David Matas at the panel discussion in Philadelphia, May 1, 2011 appeared first on Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH).

Dr. Huang stated that 1888 livers (80.9%) in 2008, and 1884 livers (86.4%) in 2009 used for liver transplantations stemmed from deceased donors.

He also indicated that 3609 (57.5%) kidney transplantations used kidneys from non-heart-beating donors in 2008, while 2665 (42.5%) kidney transplantations used kidneys from living donors.

For the year 2009 the numbers were: 3856 (59%) kidney transplantations used organs from deceased donors versus 2629 (41%) kidney transplantations used kidneys from living donors.

In the same presentation Dr. Huang also stated that over 90% of the organs from deceased donors stemmed from executed prisoners. This would imply that in order to supply the demand of liver transplantations with enough liversat least 1690 inmates were executed in each of the years 2008 and 2009.

For kidney transplantations this would imply that 3248 kidneys stemmed from deceased donors in 2008, which would require at least 1624 executions;for 2009 it would mean 3470 kidneys stemmed from deceased donors, which would imply that at least 1735 inmates were executed.

Due to potential multiple organ harvesting a final absolute number of executions is not traceable.

Given the situation that not all livers from executed prisoners might be suitablefor transplantation (e.g. prevalent liver diseases, old age etc. of the donor) or due to the lack of finding a matching recipient (e.g. blood and tissue matching; limitation due to ischemic time; after 2007, according to the CMA, organ donations only to direct family members are permitted), and due to the situation that not in all executed prisoners liver and kidneys might be suitable for transplantation, the numbers of executions needed to supply the transplantation demand with enough livers might even exceed the estimated numbers of 1690-1735 executions.

This raises the question if the promise of the Chinese Medical Association(CMA) given at the World Medical Association (WMA) conference in Copenhagen in 2007, that executed prisoners should not be used as organ source anymore (with a few exceptions of donating to direct relatives), is fully implemented. Dr. Huang’s presentation from March 2010 and the release of transplant figures for 2008 and 2009 questions if the promise of the CMA, given prior to the Olympic Games in Beijing, was put into effect over the past 3 years.

Dr. Huang also indicated that China is lacking of an established organ donation system. Until 2010 only registries for kidney and liver transplants were established. This raises again questions about the organ sourcing and underlines the role of executions as a source for organs in the past years. In his presentation Dr. Huang described a sudden increase of living organ donors starting in 2007. Given that China is still lacking of an established organ donation system and that 90% of the organs from deceased donors are still sourced from executed prisoners, the sudden increase of living organ donors raises the question if more death row candidates and other prisoners are now forcibly organ harvested while being alive. The latter was previously reported in the context of organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners.
Although the number of organ transplantations to foreign recipients seemed to decrease after 2007, the absolute number of transplantations stayed at a high level and continues to question where the organs come from given an organ donation system that is still in progress. The presentation of Dr. Huang is concerning, as it affirms that the organ procurement in China is still lacking transparency and that Falun Gong adherents as a persecuted group of people continue to be at risk being subject to unethical organ harvesting.

The post Dr. Jiefu Huang presented at the Madrid Conference 2010 appeared first on Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH).

by Celia Milne

TEL HASHOMER, ISRAEL – Because of extremely low organ donation rates at home, Israelis are among the most likely in the world to buy organ transplants elsewhere. And their health maintenance organizations and private insurance companies have been reimbursing them for it. “No doubt this transplant tourism is the direct result of the long waiting lists here in Israel,” said Dr. Jacob Lavee, director of the Heart Transplantation Unit and deputy director in the department of cardiac surgery at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Israel.

Over the last few years, it is estimated that about 200 Israelis have travelled to China for kidney transplants and about 15 have sought heart transplants. Several dozen others have bought kidney transplants in the Philippines, said Dr. Lavee, a representative of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting. Israel’s donation rate is very low, at nine donors per million population, compared with more than 20 per million in most western European countries and the U.S. The country is in the midst of passing a law that will help bring it more in line with these other countries. The new law will ban reimbursement of transplants in countries where organ donation is not performed according to internationally accepted ethical rules, said Dr. Lavee. Already, HMOs and insurance companies have stopped reimbursing these transplants.

One of the features of the new law, which is designed to increase the local donation rate, is prioritizing those who sign their donor cards. If and when they are in need of a transplant themselves, they are given priority. “This turns the donor cards into a kind of personal transplant insurance policy,” said Dr. Lavee. Public awareness of the benefits to society of organ donation may help to boost the donation rates in Israel. Several studies have tried to get at the heart of why the organ donation rate is so low. “All of them have come up with similar results, namely the misperception by the public of the Jewish religion attitude toward organ donation,” said Dr. Lavee. “While most rabbis, except for a small minority of ultra-orthodox rabbis who reject the concept of brain death, are in favour of organ donation and consider it as a noble deed, the vast public, who is not even religious but considers itself traditional, somehow misconceives this idea.

The post Dr. Jacob Lavee in The Medical Post appeared first on Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH).

The post The Transplantation Society of Australia and New Zealand (TSANZ) opposes the use of executed prisoners as organ donors. appeared first on Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH).

Adopted by the 173^rd WMA Council Session, Divonne-les-Bains, France, May 2006

Whereas, the WMA Statement on Human Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation stresses the importance of free and informed choice in organ donation; and

Whereas, the statement explicitly states that prisoners and other individuals in custody are not in a position to give consent freely, and therefore their organs must not be used for transplantation; and

Whereas, there have been reports of Chinese prisoners being executed and their organs harvested for donation;

Therefore, the WMA reiterates its position that organ donation be achieved through the free and informed consent of the potential donor.

The WMA demands that the Chinese Medical Association condemn any practice in violation of these ethical principles and basic human rights and ensure that Chinese doctors are not involved in the removal or transplantation of organs from executed Chinese prisoners.

The WMA demands that China immediately cease the practice of using prisoners as organ donors.

The post The World Medical Association Council Resolution on Organ Donation in China appeared first on Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH).