Honourable members of Parliament, thank you for your invitation to come and speak today. It truly is an honour and a pleasure to be here.
As the chair said, I am a member of an NGO called Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, which is an organization that consists of medical professionals, mostly transplant surgeons, from around the world.
In the 1990s and early 2000s evidence continued to mount that China’s transplant practices were completely unethical. As early as 2001, the first solid evidence surfaced when a Chinese transplant surgeon named Wang Guoqi came to the United States to testify in front of a United States congressional hearing that China was using organs from executed prisoners.
Medical doctors were further alarmed by the rapid exponential increase in transplantations that occurred in China from 1999 onward. China went from performing a few hundred transplants each year to performing transplants on thousands of patients each year by 2004. This situation plus the tremendous increase in the number of transplant centres across China was very concerning, since no other country's transplantation program had ever grown so fast. China had done in five years what the United States took decades to accomplish.
According to China’s own official numbers, the number of transplants performed each year went from several hundred in 1999 to well over 10,000 in 2008. According to the China Daily newspaper, the actual number was closer to 20,000. It's now recognized by the international transplant community that China performs the second-highest number of transplants a year, behind only the United States, and that it will possibly overtake them in the next year or two. China, at one point, seemed to have an overabundance of organs, and its medical tourism for organs was booming.
Chinese hospitals were all over the Internet advertising that they could guarantee patients organs within a time frame of weeks and that transplantations could be scheduled in advance. This was shocking to medical professionals since the time frame to receive organs is typically years and not weeks. And the ability to schedule a transplant surgery in advance was simply unheard of.
Some hospital websites were bold enough to state that their transplants were superior because they were able to test the living donor’s organ function prior to the harvesting. It became very apparent that organ transplantation was an extremely profitable business in China, with some hospitals stating that their organ transplant programs were their number one source of revenue. On the Internet they were quoting prices as follows: kidneys, $60,000; livers, $100,000; and hearts and lungs, $170,000.
On the surface it might make sense, since China is such a big country, that they would be transplanting in such large numbers, but a few factors really need to be taken into consideration. First, there is no effective formal public organ donation system in China. This means that the hospitals rely on local situations and they have their own waiting times and organ supply. According to the Red Cross, there are only several hundred people who have registered to become organ donors in China. This is in stark contrast to the situation in other countries, such as the United States, which has over 100 million organ donors.
In 2010 China's own Vice-Minister of Health, Dr. Huang Jiefu, admitted that between 1997 and 2008 China had performed more than 100,000 transplants, with over 90% of the organs coming from executed prisoners. China's own people stated that.
The Chinese government does not provide an official count of people executed each year; however, most experts put the number of executions anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000. Obviously this number falls far short of the 10,000 organ transplants that occur every year. Furthermore, even if the numbers were to add up, there would still be a large discrepancy for the simple reason that it's impossible, given all the variables that go into transplantation, that all these people would be suitable candidates for organ donation and that they would match the people needing an organ transplant.
There was also a major problem in that the prison population has a very high percentage of people who have hepatitis B or hepatitis C, which would not make them candidates for organ donation.
Then you have the factor and the issue of timing. Since an organ, such as a liver, once harvested lasts outside the body only several hours, you cannot stockpile organs after execution for future use. That's just not possible.
China's own laws state that prisoners, once sentenced to execution, must be executed within seven days. All of this suggests that convicted felons sentenced to death could not fully account for all the large numbers of transplantations occurring every year in China, especially when you talk about the type of advanced, scheduled transplantations that occur with medical tourism.
The question from the medical community is the following: how is China able to have such an on-demand transplant system, capable of extremely short wait times compared with every other country around the world, including the United States, where the average wait time for a kidney is over two years, Canada being over three years? The only possible way China is able to do this is to have another source of donors that is available and that can be utilized on demand.
Several investigations have been performed—including by Ethan Gutmann, sitting next to me—and they have all pointed to the use of prisoners of conscience as the main source of organs, with practitioners of Falun Gong comprising the vast majority. If you follow the timeline of China's transplant boom and you compare it with the start of the persecution of Falun Gong, which occurred in 1999, the timelines correspond almost exactly. It's estimated that two million Falun Gong practitioners were arrested nationwide and placed in detention during the first year alone of the persecution, in 1999.
China has an extremely vast prison system. According to an NGO, the Laogai foundation, it's estimated that between three million to five million people sit in these prisons at any given time. Many experts now believe that Falun Gong practitioners comprise the largest population of prisoners of conscience in China today, with up to 500,000 to a million practitioners being held at any given time. Falun Gong practitioners are also persecuted nationwide, not just in one region, making these organs available to hospitals across the entire country.
One reason this may all be possible is that China has a very unique situation: the military controls the prison system. They control the forced labour camps. They control the majority of the hospitals that are performing transplantations. When patients who go to China for organs come back, they often state that they were performed secretively by military doctors in military hospitals, often in the middle of the night.
The persecution against Falun Gong is an officially state-sanctioned policy. Falun Gong practitioners are considered enemies of the state, without the right to have any legal representation. According to my knowledge, not a single person, since the start of the persecution, has ever faced criminal charges for either the torture or murder of practitioners. The lack of legal repercussions for the murdering of Falun Gong practitioners has made them a particularly vulnerable group. Falun Gong practitioners are often unwilling to give up their true identities in order to protect their families and friends, so they sit in these jails unidentified. Furthermore, a systematic propaganda campaign against this group has demonized them to the public.
An investigation in 2007 by Canada's own David Kilgour and David Matas compiled 52 verifiable forms of proof that Falun Gong practitioners were being killed for their organs. They estimated that 41,500 organ transplants that occurred in China from the years 2000 to 2004 alone had no verifiable source other than practitioners of Falun Gong. There have also been other investigators, including European Parliament member Edward McMillan-Scott.
Falun Gong practitioners who've escaped from China often testify that they underwent serial blood and urine testing, and had physical exams, X-rays, and ultrasound testing multiple times while in prison, while their fellow inmates didn't. It's hard to believe that they were doing these expensive tests to benefit the health of these people who were being tortured in prison camps.
There have also been interviews of fellow prisoners and prison staff who witnessed Falun Gong practitioners having their organs harvested. There have been several high-level Chinese officials admitting during taped phone conversations that they are aware that Falun Gong practitioners are being used as a source for organ donation. China's own vice-minister of health, Huang Jiefu, who's often quoted, has performed hundreds of transplants using organs from prisoners. He stated in an interview with China's People's Daily that the struggle against Falun Gong is a serious political campaign; we must not be merciful.
The two foremost international transplant organizations issued a letter this year to Xi Jinping, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. In that letter, they called China's system of organ transplantation corrupt and “scorned by the international community”.
In April of this year, the director of the China organ transplant system, Wang Haibo, stated that the Chinese regime had no intention of announcing the schedule for weaning itself off the use of organs from executed prisoners, thus stating that the practice of using prisoners and prisoners of conscience as the main source of organs continues to this day, with no end in sight.
If we go by the statistics, we can estimate that every day a few dozen people are executed for their organs. If we wait another five years, there's a possibility that another 50,000 innocent lives may be taken. If we do nothing, we really run a serious risk of becoming accomplices to a great tragedy that we are witnessing in our own time.
Thank you for allowing me to be here today.