July 10, 2006 Monday

Re: Ottawa To Probe Organ Harvesting Allegations: Falun Gong Victims. China Tortures Religious Prisoners, Report Says

I was shocked to read your article about allegations that the Chinese government and its agencies are torturing religious prisoners and harvesting their organs. Subsequently, I read the full report on which your article was based -- authored by former Alberta MP David Kilgour and international human rights lawyer David Matas. I agree with Mr. Matas that profiting from the harvest of imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners' live organs is "a shocking, different form of evil."

My mother practises Falun Gong, which involves a set of slow-movement exercises and the embrace of beliefs emphasizing truthfulness, benevolence and compassion. She was arrested by the Chinese government in July of 2000 for practising Falun Gong and was about to be sent to a labour camp. She was subsequently rescued by family members and brought to Canada.

Now, being a proud Canadian citizen and breathing the air of freedom in Toronto, she could not help but think about the fate of the fellow practitioners she met in the detention centre six years ago. Have some of their organs been "donated"?

Too many Canadians will ignore organ harvesting in China because they are more concerned with other more high-profile news items, such as North Korean missile tests and new terrorists threats. But by keeping our silence in the face of this extreme evil, and by allowing our fellow Canadians to go to China to receive illegal organs, we are, in a way, condoning these inhumane activities.

I strongly urge those who plan to receive organ transplants in China to seriously verify the source of the "donated" organs. We might not be able to save those lives lost to China's harvesting scheme. But at the very least, we Canadians should not be doing anything that even indirectly encourages such barbarism.