July 11, 2006 Tuesday

Two months ago, when David Matas and I as volunteers began our investigation of allegations that Falun Gong practitioners are victims of live organ harvesting across China, neither of us anticipated how accessible and dismaying the self-incriminating evidence would prove to be.

One of our first witnesses was a woman no longer in China and not a Falun Gong adherent, who said in a credible and detailed manner that her former husband confessed to her that, for the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of Canadian dollars, he removed the corneas from approximately 2,000 Falun Gong prisoners in northeast China during a two-year period before October 2003 (at which point he refused to continue). We have included a transcript of the interview, edited somewhat to protect others still in China, as an appendix to our report.

The second body of evidence is recorded phone conversations made to hospitals, detention centres and "people's courts" by two Mandarin-speaking women from North America. To ensure the translated transcripts reflected accurately what was said, one of us followed the written transcripts in the presence of an independent certified interpreter while he simultaneously translated the recordings without the aid of the transcript.

Some of the recorded admissions are virtually inhuman. For example, Dr. Dai at the Liver Transplant Centre at Jiaotong University in Shanghai told the caller in March of this year in part of their conversation:
Caller: "I want to know how long (patients) have to wait (for a liver transplant)."
Dai: "The supply of organs we have, we have every day. We do them every day."
Caller: "We want fresh, alive ones."
Dai: "They are all alive, all alive."
Caller: "I heard some come from those who practise Falun Gong, those who are very healthy."
Dai: "Yes, we have. I can't talk clearly to you over the phone."

A third source of self-accusation is a number of websites across China. Some were removed after March 9 (when allegations about large-scale organ seizures resurfaced in world media), but a surprising number of them are still accessible.

The site of the International Transplant Network Assistance Centre notes that "viscera (one dictionary definition: 'soft interior organs . . . including the brain, lungs, heart, etc.') providers can be found immediately." The website in Tianjin City noted in a page now removed, which we have in an archive, that the "average waiting time (for a liver) is two weeks."
Given that the survival period for a liver is approximately 12 hours, the presence of a large bank of living "donors" must be the only way transplant centres across China can provide such short waits for patients.

The fourth source was a number of Falun Gong practitioners who managed to avoid becoming "donors." We discuss three in the report, but take the case of Yuzhi Wang, now of Vancouver, who spent most of 2000 and 2001 in labour camps for being a Falun Gong practitioner. Following multiple beatings by guards, she overheard doctors say she had organ damage and would not recover. Her minders immediately lost interest in her. Today, she asserts quietly that only her internal injuries enabled her to leave the camps and China to start a new life in Canada.

Overall, we found the sources for approximately 41,500 transplants done in China between 2000 (when the killing of Falun Gong practitioners for their vital organs appears to have begun) and 2006, to be unexplained. In reaching this estimate, we made the fairest allowance possible for organs taken from executed prisoners, brain-dead patients and voluntary donors during the same period.

In our report, we recommend a number of initiatives designed to reduce what is clearly a major crime against humanity, starting with requests for the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and the related committee, along with human rights organizations with far more resources than we have, to investigate the situation fully.

In the meantime, the international community should shun China's transplant sector, refusing, for example, visas for its doctors wanting to go abroad for training or vacations, toughening our own transplant laws, requiring doctors to report when they judge that patients have received trafficked organs and attempting to prevent their own nationals from going to China for organ transplants.

The Matas-Kilgour report can be found at: investigation.redirectme.net or david-kilgour.com. The two appendices referred to above are nos. 13 and 14. The authors' reply to the government of China's response to their report is available at the same location.
David Kilgour is a former secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific and an Edmonton MP between 1979 and 2006.