China, for decades, has been discretely executing people in secret to harvest their organs for medical purposes in the country.
Chinese government authorities have, in the past, consistently denied the use of organs from executed prisoners for transplants, but in 2001, when Wang Guohi, a former doctor in the Police Tianjin General Brigade Hospital, testified before the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the US House of Representatives, where these issues were brought to public attention for the first time.
It wasn't until 2005 when Dr. Huang Jiefu, then Vice Minister of Health of the People's Republic of China and a liver transplant surgeon, didn't just admit publicly for the first time that, besides from a small number of traffic victims, deceased donor organs in China came from executed prisoners, but that actually more than 90% of these donated organs came from executed prisoners.
In 2013 the Chinese Transplant Congress in Hangzhou reported that 1161 deceased organ donors, who weren't executed prisoners, supplied organs for 3175 transplants that year, and combined with living-donor kidney transplants these constituted over 49 percent of all organ transplantation in China during 2013. This means that the Chinese Government still has over 50 percent reliance on organs that are harvested from executed prisoners.
In more recent years, China has been outspoken with the notion that they have banned the use of prisoners' organs starting 2015, making citizen donation the only legitimate channel, but there are discrepancies in these statements.
Former Canadian lawmaker David Kilgour, human rights lawyer David Matas and journalist Ethan Gutmann have come out with a report that accuses China of still engaging in the systematic harvesting of organs from prisoners, and says that people whose views conflict with the ruling Chinese Communist Party are being murdered for their organs.
"The (Communist Party) says the total number of legal transplants is about 10,000 per year. But we can easily surpass the official Chinese figure just by looking at the two or three biggest hospitals," Matas said in a statement. The report estimates that 60,000 to 100,000 organs are transplanted each year in Chinese hospitals.
According to Amnesty International, "tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been arbitrarily detained" since the government launched a crackdown on the practice in 1999.
China regards Falun Gong as a "cult" and claims followers engage in "anti-China political activities."
"The government considers Falun Gong a threat to its power, and has detained, imprisoned and tortured its followers," says Maya Wang, China researcher for Human Rights Watch.
The report says detained Falun Gong practitioners were forced to have blood tests and medical exams. Those test results were placed in a database of living organ sources so quick organ matches could be made, the authors claim.
China's deception and lack of accountability will most likely continue into the future if they are not held responsible for their inhumane actions in regards to the rights of their prisoners.
