(Minghui.org) Quartz, an online media company, carried a report by Olivia Goldhill on September 27, 2019, titled: “The Blackest Market, China is accused of harvesting tens of thousands of organs to serve a thriving global market.”
The article opened with the following paragraph:
“Barely two months after Han Junqing, from Beijing, was imprisoned for practicing the spiritual discipline of Falun Gong, he died in captivity. When his family was briefly allowed to see his body, more than a month after he died, his daughter says they discovered it had been sliced open.”
The reporter had learned about the Han family's plight at an event at the Harvard Club in New York on Wednesday, September 25, that was held to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly.
At the event, Han Junqing's daughter Han Yu described how her family had gone to see her father's body almost a month after his untimely death in 2004. To this day, the family believes that Han Junqing was a victim of China's systematic forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.
In her article, Goldhill also cited the China Tribunal, which issued its final judgment in June this year that stated that without a doubt prisoners of conscience in China are being killed on a large scale for their organs.
Goldhill quoted estimates from human rights lawyers and experts that speculate that at least 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been killed for their organs since 2001 and that the Chinese regime has also killed members of other religious and ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, and some Christian sects, for their organs.
She also wrote that a senior lawyer from the China Tribunal had called on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHCR) earlier in the week to investigate China's organ harvesting crimes and take action: “Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” Hamid Sabi, counsel to the China Tribunal, had told UNHCR.
Organ harvesting is part of a $1 billion organ transplantation market in China, Goldhill wrote, citing the China Tribunal. She said that Chinese nationals and transplant tourists had all taken advantage of the ready supply of organs in China, with a liver reportedly costing as much as $160,000. The short waiting times for organs in China in particular serve as evidence of a large source of illicit organs in China, since in normal countries, voluntary organ donation systems mean that patients will wait for months or even years for a matching organ for transplant. In China, patients wait mere weeks or even just a few days. This has enticed people from all over the world to travel to China to take advantage of the surplus of organs.
Goldhill also quoted David Kilgour, the former Canadian secretary of state for Asia-Pacific and the co-author of a 2016 report on organ harvesting in China, who spoke at the event at the Harvard Club on September 25.
“What can legislators and governments do about this?” Kilgour asked. He told the audience that Belgium, Italy, Israel, Norway, Spain, and Taiwan have all already banned organ transplant tourism to China and suggested that other countries follow suit. “If Americans, Canadians, and others showed more commitment to our own values, the dreadful commerce might end quickly,” he said.
In her article, Goldhill described the plight of another family who had a representative at the event. Jiang Li, from Chongqing, spoke about how her father had been killed for practicing Falun Gong after he was thrown into a labor camp in 2008.
“My father was put into a freezer while he was still alive, and his organs were harvested, without the consent of our family,” Jiang told the event attendees.
“The family was permitted to see his body seven hours after his purported death,” Goldhill wrote, “But when they arrived, said Jiang Li, they were shocked to discover that his body, which was in a refrigerator, was still warm. They tried to do CPR, she added, but were dragged out of the building and weren’t allowed to see Jiang Xiqing again. Later, they were able to get an autopsy report, which showed his ribs were broken and his organs harvested.”
Category: Organ Harvesting
