At a human rights hearing today, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) condemned the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) forced harvesting of organs from living prisoners, calling for an “immediate concerted effort to stop this barbaric practice—not only in China, but also by its global enablers.”

            Chaired by Smith, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission hearing comes on the heels of the groundbreaking article recently published in a top, peer-reviewed U.S. medical journal citing overwhelming evidence of the CCP’s forced harvesting of organs on prisoners while they are still alive.

            “Nowhere is the principle of utter disregard for the dignity of the human person, and of using people as a utilitarian means to an end, more apparent than in the horrific practice of harvesting the organs of human beings, even before they meet the standard of brain death,” said Rep. Smith, who has chaired over 75 congressional hearings on China’s egregious human rights abuses.

            One expert witness at Smith’s hearing, Ethan Gutmann, provided shocking estimates that 25,000 to 50,000 camp detainees in China are harvested each year for two or three organs, amounting to an annual transplant industry of somewhere between 50,000 to 150,000 organs.

            “What compounds the shock to the conscience is not simply the execution of people declared enemies of the state, as if on order to provide certain organs to meet transplant needs, but that this is also an apparent form of punishment, and indeed a tool of genocide meant to cull minority populations deemed ‘undesirable’ by the State,” said Smith, who last year introduced the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (H.R. 1592) to establish measures to prevent the cruel practice and the international trafficking of persons to remove their organs.

            Entitled “Forced Organ Harvesting in China: Examining the Evidence,” Smith’s hearing included compelling testimony from Dr. Enver Tohti Bugdha, an oncology surgeon who was ordered by the Chinese government to carry out the first known case of live organ harvesting in 1994; Sir Geoffrey Nice, Chair of the China Tribunal; and Matthew Robertson, co-author of the groundbreaking article published in the American Journal of Transplantation.

            “The whole operation took around 30-40 minutes, chief surgeons happily put those organs into a weird looking box, and said that: ok, now you take your team back to hospital; remember nothing happened today,” said Dr. Tohti.

            Sir Geoffrey Nice highlighted that the independent tribunal he chairs has found that “forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale and that Falun Gong practitioners have been one—and probably the main—source of organ supply.”

            “In plain language, the papers appear to show that the donors, who were prisoners, were alive at the time of surgery, and were killed by the transplant surgeons in the process of heart extraction,” said Matthew Robertson.

            Other key witnesses offering testimony included Ethan Gutmann, China Studies Research Fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation; and Robert Destro, Former Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the U.S. State Department.

            Gutmann noted that while the practice occurs in China, the global community has enabled the horrific practice. “This catastrophe was created by Beijing, yet it was continuously enabled by a handful of Western doctors who thought they could ride the Chinese dragon and come back home as if everything was normal,” Gutmann said.

            Robert Destro added, “What incentives are there for diplomats to raise this difficult issue, or, in the short term, to spend time and precious political capital reporting on the nature and extent of the problem? I submit to you that there is very little incentive. It is far easier to be willfully blind than to ask hard questions.”

            Smith, an internationally recognized human rights lawmaker, has been leading efforts in Congress to combat forced organ harvesting, including chairing a hearing more than two decades ago where a Chinese security official testified that he and his other security agents were executing prisoners to harvest their organs for transplant.  

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