The Canadian Press: Organs taken from ‘unwilling’ Falun Gong: report

Ottawa – Calling it a crime against humanity, a new report says China is harvesting vital organs from devotees of the outlawed Falun Gong movement.

Hearts, kidneys, livers and corneas are removed from executed practitioners of the meditative regime and sold for transplantation at hefty prices, sometimes to foreigners, concludes the report.

Winnipeg human rights lawyer David Matas and former Liberal cabinet minister David Kilgour, who undertook a two-month investigation, acknowledged Thursday their findings were almost too astonishing to comprehend.

"The very horror makes us reel back in disbelief," the report says.

"But that disbelief does not mean that the allegations are untrue."

At a news conference, Matas called the practice a shocking "new form of evil" on the planet.

"Who would have believed the Holocaust before it happened?"

Kilgour, former secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific region, said Canadians are among those who have traveled to China for illicit organs.

"It’s appalling." he said in an interview. "You don’t want to believe it."

The pair conducted the probe as unpaid volunteers at the request of the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, a Washington-based organization with a branch in Ottawa.

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Kilgour and Matas insist their research was conducted independently of the coalition and any other organization or government.

They were unsuccessful in obtaining visas to visit China to investigate.

Instead, they gathered testimony from witnesses in Canada, the United States, France and Australia, consulted the websites of Chinese transplantation centers and studied transcripts of Mandarin conversations with doctors and other officials at hospitals and detention centers in China.

"We believe that there has been and continues today, to be large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners," the report says.

It calls on the United Nations to determine whether China is in violation of the UN protocol to prevent trafficking in persons, which bans organ removal.

In July 1999, China’s Communist government outlawed Falun Gong, a practice of meditation and exercises with roots in traditional culture that had attracteded millions.

Supporters say Beijing, seeing Falun Gong as a threat, has ordered thousands of followers detained and hundreds killed.

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The report says figures indicate about 60,000 transplants occurred in China from 2000 to 2005. Of those, an estimated 18,500 would have come from legitimated sources, the report adds, leaving 41,500 unexplained transplants.