Falun Gong
Since the Chinese Communist Party banned Falun Gong in China in 1999, the Chinese authorities have utilized a wide variety of mechanisms in their efforts to force adherents to renounce their faith and ultimately wipe out the spiritual group.
Falun Gong Practitioner Zhou Xiangyang Resists Persecution with Hunger
August 2, 2011
Mr. Zhou Xiangyang has been holding hunger strikes to resist the persecution after he was arrested and sent to Gangbei Prison, Tianjin City on March 5, 2011. His mother and wife have only been able to see him twice in the past four months, and those two times were because the prison was pressured from the outside. Mr. Zhou looked very thin and weak when his family saw him. He asked his family members to hire a lawyer to sue the police for the illegal arrest and ransacking of his home.
Organ Harvesting Overview
Mounting evidence tells a terrible tale of murder and mutilation in China. Witnesses and Chinese physicians reveal that thousands of persons affiliated with the Falun Gong are being killed for their organs, which are sold and transplanted at enormous profit.
The kidneys, livers, and hearts are often sold on demand to overseas patients, who can afford them. That is, the prisoners of conscience are tissue typed and then killed once a matching recipient is found for their organs. (see 2010 video below)
China Announces Measures to Limit Illegal Organ Transplants
Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 7:15 am UTC
Chinese state media say the government is testing a new system to detect and prevent illegal human organ procurements and transplants.
The Communist Party flagship People's Daily said Thursday the system will make it easier for doctors and the public to report illegal organ trading. In an article first published in Taiwan's China Daily, it said the Chinese health ministry is also considering a registration system for organ transplant surgeons.
The article says China has a problem with illegal agencies that resort to forging paperwork to find matching organs for patients. It says the country also has unqualified hospitals that conduct organ transplants for large profits.
Foreign news organizations and rights groups say as many as two-thirds of the organs used in Chinese transplants come from executed prisoners. They also say wealthy foreigners travel to China seeking to purchase organs from unscrupulous dealers.
China to crack down on illegal transplants
Updated: 2011-08-04 07:31
By Shan Juan (China Daily)
BEIJING - China's Ministry of Health is set to establish a reporting system in a bid to crack down on illegal human organ procurements and transplants, a statement on the ministry's website said on Tuesday.
Due to a severe shortage of donated organs for transplants, some hospitals on the mainland resort to illegal organ trading, seriously tarnishing the image of the industry and undermining its healthy and sustainable development, said Vice-Minister of Health Huang Jiefu.
"The coming system held by the ministry would be open to qualified transplant centers nationwide and the general public to receive tip-offs on illegal practices, primarily the living organ trades," said Xia Qiang, director of the liver surgery and transplant department of Renji Hospital in Shanghai, who was invited by the ministry to attend a conference about the new initiative on July 15.
Liu Yong, a division director of the ministry's department of medical regulation, said the system is now under trial operation.
At the meeting, stakeholders including officials and clinical doctors also discussed a registration system especially for organ transplant surgeons, which might be introduced soon to further regulate the practice.
"That's more in line with international practices and has been written into the revised version of the current regulations for organ transplants, which are still under revision at the State Council," Liu said.
Currently, to land matching organs, some illegal agencies turn to living organ trades by forging paperwork, experts said.
In a recent court case in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu province, a human-organ trafficking suspect surnamed Su was accused of organizing illegal organ trades at least seven times from 2008 to March this year.
In addition, some unqualified hospitals also carry out organ transplants for large profits, which poses health risks to the recipients who have usually failed to land a match at qualified hospitals, said Qian Jianmin, chief transplant surgeon with the Shanghai Huashan Hospital.
Due to the limited capacity of the unqualified hospitals, such desperate patients have to go to authorized transplant centers for follow-up services, said Xia.
"Under the coming system, centers are encouraged to report such situations to the ministry to help authorities detect and end such irregularities," he said.
"So far we don't know when the system will formally begin operation and whether it's mandatory reporting or not for transplant centers," he noted.
"Like me, I think most of the practitioners would welcome such a move," he added.
Currently, China has more than 140 competent organ transplant centers registered with the ministry nationwide.
To encourage the nation's first deceased organ donation system - operated by the ministry and the Red Cross Society of China - the ministry planned to authorize more centers to procure organ donations only from the system, which was now in trial runs in selected regions.
"That takes time, at least several decades, for the industry to shake off a long-term dependence on executed prisoners as the dominant organ source," Qian said.
Official statistics showed that of 1.5 million Chinese who need transplants each year, only 10,000 can receive one, largely due to scarce organ donations.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/china/2011-08/04/content_13047419.htm
Related
Govt announces crackdown on illegal organ transplants Source: Global Times
[01:58 April 19 2011]
By Zhang Han
The Ministry of Health (MOH) on Monday issued a circular calling for tighter supervision of human organ transplants, and announced a new round of crackdowns on illegal operations.The circular said unauthorized medical personnel or institutions that carried out organ transplants would be severely punished. Institutions would be fined eight to 10 times the fees charged for the transplant, and would also be downgraded as well as suspended.
The MOH also said it would launch a nationwide campaign that would mainly focus on illegal transplants in unauthorized medical institutions, the Beijing Evening News reported.The campaign will continue until the end of this year.
The MOH's recent moves come in the wake of a widely reported case of a 26-year-old who had had his kidney forcibly removed by staff at a hospital in Linfen, Shanxi Province, the Beijing Evening News reported on Monday.
The victim, Hu Jie, had gone to an underground kidney market and discussed selling his kidney in order to pay back his 18,000 yuan ($2,757) of debt last year. However, when he decided to abandon the plan at the last moment, personnel from the market as well as Changliang Hospital in Linfen forced him to go through with it, China National Radio reported.
The Shanxi health ministry confirmed the report and ordered the hospital to suspend its operations."The case is a typical example of an illegal transplant being carried out in a medical institution that has not been authorized to undertake this kind of operation," Ren Guoliang, a professor of anatomy at Zhejiang University, told the Global Times.The circular also stated that medical institutions or personnel not authorized to conduct organ transplants would not be allowed to extract human organs for any reason.
Currently, 163 hospitals in China have the authority to carry out organ transplant operations.
Wang Qiong contributed to this story
2010 Video; Witness To China's Organ Harvesting
Uploaded by NTDTV on Aug 6, 2010
A witness to organ harvesting in China is now in immigration limbo in Switzerland.
Nijat Abudureyimu used to work at a prison in north-western Xinjiang Province.
His job was to lead prisoners from their cells to their executions. But, according to the Epoch Times, these executions weren't conventional.
Police would shoot the prisoners in a way that would not kill them, so that their organs would be in prime condition to be taken out for transplant surgeries. The Uighur security agent worked at the prison of Liuwandao from 1993 to 1998. In a recent interview with Swiss newspaper Le Matin, Abudureyimu said (quote) "I saw many scenes of torture ... an electrical appliance on women's genitals...the electric shocks, the scream." Abudureyimu fled Xinjiang in 2006. His refugee application in Norway was rejected, and while waiting to be assessed in Italy, he fled to Switzerland after feeling threatened when a Chinese man photographed him at an Italian refugee camp. So far Swiss authorities seem unwilling to deal with Abudureyimu's case.
They are relying rigidly on an EU regulation requiring the country of entry to assess the asylum seekers' claims.In Abudureyimu's case, Italy has to assess his claim, and he will either send him back there or be deported to China. Alim Seytoff from the World Uighur Congress says Abudureyimu needs to be granted asylum for his own safety.[Alim Seytoff, Vice Chairman, World Uyghur Congress]:"It is our hope that Swiss government, in light of his unique situation, will consider granting him political asylum in Switzerland. Because returning him to China is like sentencing him to death.
The Chinese government will simply execute him."Author and researcher Ethan Gutmann told the Epoch Times that Abudureyimu is an important witness of organ harvesting by the Chinese communist regime. Instead of deporting him, Gutmann says the Swiss authorities should have Abudureyimu testify before a government organization.Gutmann and other international human rights activists have been investigating claims that the Chinese regime has been systematically taking organs from living Falun Gong practitioners, and selling them for profit, since it began persecuting members of the spiritual group in 1999.
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