Bipartisan legislation authored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), Co-Chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, to combat the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ghoulish industry of stealing people’s organs cleared a major hurdle in Congress today as the Foreign Affairs Committee voted unanimously to advance the bill to the House Floor.

            Smith’s bill (HR 1154)—cosponsored by Reps. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Bill Keating (D-MA) and Kathy Manning (D-NC)—comes in response to the CCP’s state-sponsored harvesting of organs from human beings, especially Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs and other Central Asians in concentration camps.    

            “What has become apparent through open-source investigation and witness accounts, is that there is one country—one country in particular—which is engaged in state-sponsored harvesting of human organs from otherwise healthy human beings, on a systematic and industrial scale in absolute violation of ethics governing transplantation,” said Smith, who has chaired 77 congressional hearings on the CCP’s egregious human rights abuse. “That country is the People’s Republic of China under Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.”

            “Under Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, the cruelty of murdering between 60,000 to 100,000 young victims every year—average age 28—to steal their organs is unimaginable,” said Smith, who chaired a chilling hearing last year that helped exposed the regime’s forced organ harvesting of prisoners while they are still alive. “China’s organ harvesting industry is truly barbaric.”

            Last year, the United Nations estimated that forced organ removal is an international criminal enterprise worth between $840 million and $1.7 billion, noting it was just the “tip of the iceberg” and calling it a “hidden crime.”

            “My legislation is an extremely important first step, but we need a concerted effort to stop this barbaric practice—starting first and foremost with the People’s Republic of China, but secondly its global enablers,” said Smith.

            Among its provisions, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023­­—which has been endorsed by the Campaign for Uyghurs, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the Uyghur American Association, Victims of Communism, the Falun Dafa Association of Washington DC, and Friends of Falun Gong—would:

            • Amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to require reports on forced organ harvesting and trafficking in persons for purposes of the removal of organs in foreign countries;

            • Impose sanctions on any person the President determines funds, sponsors or otherwise facilitates forced organ harvesting or trafficking in persons for purposes of the removal of organs; and

            • Block and prohibit all transactions in property and interests in property and makes that person inadmissible to the United States and ineligible to receive a visa.

            Smith—who chaired a hearing almost 25 years ago with a Chinese security official who testified that he and his other security agents were executing prisoners to harvest their organs for transplantation—said “the evidence that China has been committing forced organ harvesting has been hiding in plain sight.”

            Smith pointed to the work of Dr. Jacob Lavee and Matthew Robertson published in a top, peer-reviewed US medical journal that examined Chinese medical journal articles and found “71 papers gave explicit descriptions of surgeons appearing to violate the dead donor rule while procuring hearts from prisoners. 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.”

            “People are finally waking up to the brutality of the CCP,” Smith said. “We in the United States—in the medical field in particular—must examine our moral complicity in this most heinous of crimes.”

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