The House of Representatives today overwhelmingly passed (413-2) legislation—HR 1154—authored by Rep. Chris Smith, Co-Chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, to combat the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ghoulish industry of stealing organs from young people, especially Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs and other Central Asians in concentration camps. Smith’s bill now moves to the Senate for further consideration.

            “These crimes against humanity are unimaginable,” said Smith, who led today’s Floor debate on HR 1154 and who has chaired over 85 congressional hearings and markups on China’s human rights abuses, including a chilling hearing last year that helped expose the regime’s forced organ harvesting of prisoners while they are still alive.

            At Smith’s hearing, a doctor testified how he had performed one such surgery on a victim of a botched execution and discovered as he began cutting that the victim was in a state of shock—not dead yet—and a live vivisection on a living human was being performed.

            “Ethnic groups targeted for mass harvesting include Uyghurs—who suffer from Xi Jinping’s ongoing genocide—and the Falun Gong, whose peaceful meditation and exercise practices—and exceptional good health—make their organs highly desirable,” said Smith. “The Chinese Communist Party has declared them to be an ‘evil cult’—fit for butchering.”

            “We also know though open-source Chinese language media that elderly high ranking Chinese Communist Party officials have received replacement organs from the very people they despise and oppress at the People’s Liberation Army Hospital 301 in Beijing,” continued Smith.

            Smith—who chaired a hearing almost 25 years ago where a Chinese security official testified that he and his other security agents were executing prisoners to harvest their organs for transplantation—said “while this still shocks me, I cannot say it surprises me.”

            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.”

            To combat this heinous and inhuman practice, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023 (HR 1154):

            ·         Amends 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, including and especially in China;

            ·         The imposition of serious 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;

            ·         Civil penalties include a fine of up to $250,000; and

            ·         Criminal penalties include a fine of up to $1 million dollars and imprisonment for not more than 20 years, or both.

            ·         Sanctions also include blocking and prohibiting all transactions in property and interests in property, and making such persons inadmissible to the United States and ineligible to receive a visa.

            “State-sponsored forced organ harvesting is big business for Xi and the Chinese Communist Party and shows absolutely no signs of abating,” said Smith. “We must act—decisively.”

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