(Minghui.org) The Washington Times published a column by U.S. Congressman Chris Smith detailing evidence presented to a China Affairs Committee hearing regarding the ongoing organ harvesting atrocities against Falun Gong practitioners.

Rep. Smith writes: “In the mid-1990s, I began holding hearings on the practice of organ harvesting of prisoners in China, and unfortunately, the controversial practice has not gone away. At a hearing for which I was co-chairman last week, two subcommittees of the House Foreign Affairs Committee heard that even though few Chinese voluntarily donate organs, China stands next behind the United States in the yearly number of organ transplants. With 600 transplant centers, it has become a destination for 'transplant tourism.' Each transplant of a heart or liver can provide more than $100,000 in revenue.

“What adjectives can we use to describe the prospect that Chinese doctors and hospitals are engaged in large-scale harvesting of human organs for profit? The ordinary words such as 'disturbing,' 'appalling' or even 'shocking' are inadequate.”

This is all counter to international procedural and ethical guidelines for organ transplants that have been widely adopted by the medical profession. The 2008 Declaration of Istanbul requires that organ donors must give consent to the organ donations. It also states that condemned prisoners cannot be donors.

But in the case of organ harvesting practices in China, it is clear that consent is not granted, and that many of the so-called organ donors are Falun Gong practitioners, prisoners of conscience murdered for their organs and the huge illicit profits that such atrocities provide.

Rep. Smith wrote: “A witness at the hearing, Ethan Gutmann, interviewed Chinese medical personnel now outside China. He learned of the removal of organs by teams of military doctors in medical vans immediately after executions. The victims, he learned, came from China’s prisons or from re-education through labor camps — far from justice and investigation. They are, of course, unable to escape and testify, and expeditious cremation destroys physical evidence.

“Some Falun Gong practitioners released from labor camps report that the camp doctors gave them frequent physical examinations, with special attention to their blood type and the health of their kidneys, livers, lungs, hearts and eyes — 'the retail organs.'

“Many members of this spiritual movement — unjustly held, abused, subjected to psychological and physical torture for nothing more than fidelity to 'truthfulness, compassion and forbearance' — refused to reveal their names when taken into custody. They feared reprisal against relatives and other practitioners. Their anonymity made them vulnerable to having their lives taken from them to provide organs for transplants.

“The most gruesome testimony came from Chinese doctors who told Mr. Gutmann that some of the organs for transplant came from still-living victims.”

This news comes as no surprise to Falun Gong practitioners, as widespread news of organ harvesting atrocities first came to light in March 2006. An independent investigation undertaken by Canada's former Secretary of State for Asia Pacific, Hon. David Kilgour, and renowned human rights lawyer David Matas came to the conclusion that some 41,500 organ transplants had occurred in China for which the source of the organs could be explained in no other way than to have been harvested from the living bodies of detained Falun Gong practitioners.

It is good that Rep. Chris Smith has publicly spoken out about this issue. As more and more people are made aware of these atrocities, surely they will soon come to an end, and the perpetrators responsible for these horrors will meet with the justice that they deserve.