Evidence of meeting #30 for Subcommittee on International Human Rights in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was hospitals.
A video is available from Parliament.
Lawyer, As an Individual
Our report came out in June of this year. We started doing it in September of last year. All of it is subsequent to the changes for the update. We have archived everything we saw, so you can see everything we saw.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Michael Levitt
There's a little bit of time left.
I was interested in asking about multilateral action and what Canada perhaps can do in the international community with allies. I know there was the Istanbul declaration, and 2008 seems to be the last thing that took place in terms of international activity on this.
Is there other work being done multilaterally, anything you can suggest or shed light on?
As an Individual
Can we both have a go at that?
Nothing is effectively being done. As you know, China has a veto in the UN, but some of the committees of the UN have.... The UN Committee Against Torture, which is a group of non-UN employees, experts, has been very helpful. The UN rapporteur on torture has been very helpful in the past. It's hard to get a multilateral organization like the UN or.... The European Union passed a very good resolution that we are fond of, but not much has been done, except in Spain. It seems when you get a large number of governments involved, this is not an issue that you can....
One country we know about, which I agreed not to name, was finding that a lot of their people were going to China for organs. Rather recently they have agreed they will stop their people from going to China. We won't name the country. We'll see how they do in stopping that.
What I'm really saying—and David may have a different view—is we're trying to get countries like Canada...and it's a little embarrassing when these two Canadians have been running all over the world, yet Taiwan and Spain and Israel are really way ahead of us. It would be very nice if one of you or all of you would get this new Government of Canada to bring in a bill that would simply do what Taiwan has done. If Taiwan can do it, it should be relatively easy for this country to do it on an all-party basis.
David may have a completely different answer.
Lawyer, As an Individual
Yes. I certainly agree with what he said, but I do have a couple of additional suggestions.
One is the universal periodic review by the United Nations Human Rights Council. I've been to both of them since the review has started, when China has been up for consideration, and I've listened to all the statements. Canada distinguished itself, I think, and was alone in mentioning the persecution of Falun Gong, and it should continue to do so, but I also think it should deal with organ transplant abuse directly. It shouldn't be just the persecution of Falun Gong, but persecution of Falun Gong and transplant abuse.
Another multilateral body I draw your attention to is the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe has approved and opened for signature a treaty on organ trafficking that allows non-Council of Europe member states to sign. Canada should sign and ratify that treaty, and implement it through legislation. Canada is an observer at the Council of Europe. David Kilgour and I, when we were in Sweden, met with the Swedish parliamentarian who is planning to mobilize the parliamentarians of the Council of Europe to endorse a resolution and investigation on this issue. Canada, although it can't vote, can speak at the Council of Europe, and it should speak and support this initiative.
I also say, and I second this with David Kilgour, that I don't think we have to wait for a multilateral institution to act. I don't think we have to wait for others to do something before we do something. This is an area where Canada, on its own, can take some leadership, particularly on the issue of investigation. The European Union has called for an investigation and hasn't done it. The U.S. House of Representatives has called for an investigation, but that hasn't happened. Of course I would like Parliament to call for an investigation, but I would like Canada to do it, and not just in the way David Kilgour and I have done it as civil society, but as a governmental thing.
NDP
Cheryl Hardcastle NDP Windsor—Tecumseh, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen, for the hard work you're doing. I've been intrigued by your answers. I'll just present a little package, and then you go ahead and talk for as long as the chair allows you under the time allocation, because it's very intriguing to hear you.
I don't know where to start except to say those were excellent suggestions with regard to tangible ways that we can tighten up and strengthen the recommendations of this subcommittee. I can tell you that just from reading some of the text and having the updates and the evidence.
Mr. Miller did ask about the numbers. I find it intriguing that you went to local hospitals to get numbers, and that they are more willing to give you those numbers because they're oblivious to the issues that the state is facing, right? You can riff a little bit more on that if you want to.
All of us were briefed on some on this, and I just want you to hear the question. Is the potential to extract organs after the execution of prisoners a primary factor in the decision to execute the prisoners, or merely an incidental benefit?
That's the crux of it and part of our role in the investigation and in the international human rights stance, so take it away.
As an Individual
Thank goodness the number of executions in China is starting to go down, but the problem is that as the executions go down—and they have to be done within seven days, as David mentioned—the demand for organs from prisoners of conscience who have no hearing, no appeal, nothing—
The way it works, as I'm sure a lot of you know, is that if David needs an organ, he goes to Shanghai and pays a lot of money for an organ at People's No. 1 Hospital. They then do the blood test and tissue tests and find a match for him out in one of these work camps. The person who unluckily happens to be a match for David Matas is taken in. Their liver is taken out and is flown to Shanghai in a People's Liberation Army aircraft, and he is told he's getting a liver from a murderer or something, they would probably say.
One of the reasons the Falun Gong are so sought after is that they don't smoke or drink. They often tend to be very healthy people.
Lawyer, As an Individual
In terms of primary and incidental, it depends on the type of prisoner. If it's a prisoner sentenced to death, then it would be incidental. They're going to be executed anyway. To a certain extent, it started off as incidental and then became primary, partly because the system had already been set up; it's just a matter of shifting.
The Falun Gong and the other prisoners of conscience, but particularly Falun Gong, were very heavily vilified with this incitement to hatred, which depersonalized them, particularly in the eyes of the people in the state system, the jailers, who tended to buy into this propaganda.
The Falun Gong are normally not sentenced to anything. They're certainly not sentenced to death. Some of them are sentenced for disrupting social order and get a three-year sentence, but a lot of them aren't even sentenced to that. Falun Gong, although it was repressed by a Communist Party decision, was never legally officially banned. You don't violate a law by practising Falun Gong. You just violate party policy, which of course is above the law.
When it came to the killing of Falun Gong for their organs, that wasn't incidental. That was primary. Otherwise, they would still be alive, and many of them are still alive in arbitrary detention in China as a vast forced organ donor bank.
NDP
As an Individual
A number of Falun Gong practitioners have managed to get out of these camps and out of China. We've talked to them. Some of them are in Toronto, I believe. You can talk to them and hear stories that just make you sick.
They have family members. That's why you have placards all over the country and over much of the world: it's because this war against Falun Gong has been going on since July of 1999, and it continues. We call it a new crime against humanity. What's happening to Falun Gong practitioners is inhuman.
Lawyer, As an Individual
I can answer that. First, that's a good question. That's a problem we had to grapple with, because we start with no corpses. The body is cremated. There are no witnesses because everything happens in a closed place. It's either perpetrators or victims. There's no crime scene. The operating room is cleaned up afterwards. There are no documents except official party documents that are not going to be released to us, so what do we do? How do we look at it?
When we started, we were asked to investigate this. We weren't given any money, any data, or any direction. Our view was we didn't know. We didn't want to come to this conclusion. My preference would have been the opposite, that this wasn't happening. We walked around it. We talked to people who got out of prison and out of China, patients who went into China, doctors. We looked at hospital websites. We looked at anything that came out of China that we could.
Of course, what made it even more difficult was that as we were going through this research, any time we cited something from an official Chinese source, it would disappear. We would archive everything. This is a rolling cover-up. I don't know if David Kilgour likes this example, but I ask myself what we would know about the Holocaust today if the Nazis had won World War II. That's the sort of situation we're faced with. It's a matter of piecing together what evidence we can.
Since we've done that, you'll get denials and rejections from people out of interest, like the Communist Party of China, but nobody who's done the research independently and doesn't have a vested interest in the outcome has contradicted our research, or even questioned it, which is how Ethan Gutmann came about his work, and Kirk Allison, Arne Schwartz, Jay Lavee, and so on.
Cheryl Hardcastle NDP Windsor—Tecumseh, ON
What happened in Taiwan? It's kind of shocking that they're the vanguard leaders in this. Who knew, right?
As an Individual
Mr. Chairman, I didn't mean to make fun of you. I used to have your job a long time ago, as you mentioned. You're doing a great job.
Taiwan is a fascinating case. There's a lot of hepatitis in Taiwan, as you probably know, and a lot of people from Taiwan I think used to go to China. The mayor of Taipei right now is Mayor Ko, and he's a transplant surgeon. He won in an absolute landslide. It was about a year and a half ago. He went over to China and made inquiries about where they could get organs in China. In one hospital in one city he went to, they told him they only had Falun Gong organs available for transplants, so he came back and gave an interview with Ethan Gutmann about this, and Ethan's book came out just in the middle of the election campaign in Taipei.
We were travelling in a car in B.C. together and there were phone calls every five minutes, because this was getting to be very embarrassing. Ethan has a very high opinion of Mayor Ko, and Mayor Ko won in a landslide with 700,000 votes or something. He's a good guy on this, believe me.
If Taiwan can do it with both parties' support, why on earth can't we in Canada, with all-party support, do a similar type of measure?
Lawyer, As an Individual
I wonder if I might add to that just a bit. I think there's a tendency, at least in some quarters, for people to say, “Oh, we shouldn't confront China, because it may be against our economic interests.” I think Taiwan is a good answer to that, because they have had, at various times, a lot of confrontation with China politically, yet economically they have thrived in their relations with China.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Michael Levitt
Thank you. I see that it's now just a couple of minutes before the end, so I'm going to cut off the questions there.
Would it be possible for you to please send a copy of the full, updated report to the clerk so she can distribute it to all members of this committee and to anybody else who's sitting here today who would like it?
As an Individual
It takes 20 minutes to download the PDF, but we of course will do it.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Michael Levitt
I would like to thank you both for coming and once again bringing our attention to this very important issue. I know you were here last year and I really appreciate your being here today. It's an important issue. I know many interested parties came to listen to this testimony today. I want to thank them for coming.
Again, Professor Cotler, thank you for being here today as well.
Thank you very much.
The meeting is adjourned.