Thank you, Mr. Chair.
With your permission, colleagues, I am going to make my presentation in English. However, I will be pleased to reply to your questions in French.
I will skip one sentence per paragraph. If anyone has the statement, it may be hard to keep up, but I know that time is very precious because you want to ask questions.
Thank you for holding this hearing. I am very pleased that you're doing this.
China's 5,000-year-old civilization has given much to the world and is deserving of much respect. When Falun Gong exercises and principles initially were introduced to the Chinese public in 1992, as I'm sure you all know, the party-state not only acquiesced in its expansion but assisted, inviting its founder to teach in government facilities and praising Falun Gong for the benefits it introduced to public health and ethics generally.
However, the more the movement grew, the more resistance it encountered, no doubt because some party members found that a large, independent group was unacceptable. Party leader Jiang Zemin made an overnight decision to eradicate it, even though many members of the politburo were familiar with the practice and many party members were doing the exercises.
On July 22, 1999, the Communist Party leadership launched a protracted and violent campaign whose stated purpose was to—quote—“eradicate” Falun Gong. Beatings, detentions in forced labour camps, brainwashing, and torture became the daily lot of many Falun Gong. The methods included shocking with high-voltage electric batons, sleep deprivation, starvation, sexual assault, forced abortions, drug injections, and forced feedings.
I should stress from the start that Falun Gong practitioners had no desire to become involved in politics and never intended to challenge the Communist Party. Even after nearly 14 years of persecution, their only political objective is to seek peacefully the end to their persecution across China.
As you probably all know, after 1980 the party-state began withdrawing funds from the health system, obliging it to make up the difference through service charges to mostly uninsured patients. Selling the organs of executed convicts became a major source of funds because of world demand. Falun Gong later became the major additional source of organs. Organ prices were posted on many websites in China.
David Matas and I visited about a dozen countries to interview Falun Gong practitioners who were sent to China's forced labour camps and who managed later to leave the camps and China itself. Most were sent to camps after mid-1999 without any form of hearing and on only a police signature. This model, by the way, was created in Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Third Reich and copied in the 1950s by Mao.
Practitioners told us of working in appalling conditions for up to 16 hours daily, with no pay, little food, crowded sleeping conditions, and torture. As subcontractors to multinational companies, they made export products ranging from garments to Christmas decorations. This, of course, is gross corporate irresponsibility and a violation of the WTO rules, and calls for an effective response by all governments that trade with China.
I might mention that there's a link between the labour done in these forced labour camps and the loss of manufacturing jobs in places such as Canada. One estimate of the number of people in these camps was 350,000 in 340 forced labour camps. That's a lot of jobs that are being lost in places such as our own country. I believe strongly that Canada and other countries should ban forced labour products, by legislation, which puts an onus on importers to prove that their goods are not made in effect by slaves.
According to the research that David Matas and I have done, as is set out in our book Bloody Harvest, which you referred to, Mr. Chairman, practitioners have been killed in the thousands since 2001 so that their organs could be trafficked to Chinese and foreign patients. For the period 2000-2005 alone, Matas and I concluded that for 41,500 transplants done, the only plausible explanation for sourcing was Falun Gong.
As a result, what has happened internationally? What kinds of international initiatives have been taken?
Since 2006, several UN special rapporteurs have asked the Chinese government for an explanation of the allegation of organ pillaging from live Falun Gong practitioners. They pointed out to the government that a full explanation would disprove the allegations, but the party-state has provided no meaningful answer, simply denying the charges.
The independent experts of the UN Committee Against Torture have also addressed the issue of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. In November 2008, it was stated that:
information [was] received that Falun Gong practitioners have been extensively subjected to torture and ill-treatment in prisons and that some of them have been used for organ transplants.
What about the European Parliament? In September of 2006, the European Parliament conducted a hearing, at which David Matas and I both testified, and adopted a resolution condemning the detention and torture of Falun Gong practitioners and expressing concern over reports of organ harvesting.
In Taiwan in 2007, the director of the Department of Health reported requesting that Taiwanese doctors not recommend to patients to travel to China for transplants.
In Australia—as you can see in the brief, they are on the list of countries—two hospitals have banned joint research programs with China.
What about Canada? In 2008, former MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj introduced into our House of Commons extraterritorial legislation banning transplant tourism. His bill, and one in Belgium, would have penalized any transplant patient who received an organ without the consent of the donor when the patient knew or ought to have known of the absence of consent.
In France, in 2010, parliamentarian Valérie Boyer, along with several other members, introduced a bill at a sitting of the National Assembly.
In the United States, in September of 2006 the U.S. Congress held a hearing on organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. Perhaps more importantly, in October 2012, in the middle of an election campaign, 106 members of Congress urged the U.S. State Department to release information on organ pillaging in China from Falun Gong practitioners.
This is interesting. The U.S. State Department, in its 2011 human rights report released in May 2012, acknowledged the following:
Overseas and domestic media and advocacy groups continued to report instances of organ harvesting, particularly from Falun Gong practitioners and Uighurs.
That's the first time they actually acknowledged it. David Matas and I went to the State Department as early as 2006, but they finally acknowledged these concerns in 2012.
With respect to NGOs, there are a whole lot of comments in the brief about various NGOs that have done work in this area. I might mention Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, which is a non-government organization founded by medical doctors. Torsten Trey, the co-editor of the book, was the founder, and they've been very active in this issue.
How much time do I have, Mr. Chair?