.png)
Canadian David Matas said his advocacy for human rights is as much about supporting the victims of rights abuse as it is about raising awareness to stop the abuse. (Woody Wu/AFP/Getty Images)
Australians should keep the pressure up on China about human rights abuses recommends international human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, David Matas.
Speaking at the Sydney launch of Chinese and English versions of his book Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for their Organs, Mr Matas said although it appeared that there had been little change since the first report on organ harvesting in 2006, Chinese authorities had responded to pressure.
Illegal organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners continues in China today and the figures for transplants remain high, over 10,000 transplants a year, Mr Matas said, but Chinese authorities had made changes to stop transplant tourism and had reduced the number of hospitals conducting organ transplants. They had reduced the number of crimes awarded the death penalty, centralised decision making about the death penalty and also endeavoured to put in place an organ donor system, although it had gained only 37 donors during 2010.
Allegations Were True
Mr Matas said when he was first requested, in 2006, to gather information about reports of illegal organ harvesting in China, he knew it would be a difficult task. He agreed to it however, knowing, as a former legal advisor to Amnesty International, that without visible victims or witnesses to the acts, no non-government organisations (NGO’s) would take it on.
Along with former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour, who is also a lawyer, Mr Matas compiled the first report in 2006, then an updated version in 2008, and finally the book, now in its fourth print run, in 2009.
Denied access to China to verify the claims, the two lawyers collated over 33 different avenues of evidence, all of which can be independently verified, Mr Matas told The Epoch Times.
They concluded, not from “from any single item of evidence but the piecing together of all the evidence” that the horrific crime was indeed happening.
Labour camps around China, used to detain Falun Gong practitioners in their thousands, had become virtual organ banks for a burgeoning and lucrative transplant industry run through the military and state owned hospitals.
The most telling piece of evidence was the discrepancy between the number of transplants recorded by Chinese authorities and the number of executions.
Before 2006 Chinese authorities had denied that prisoners on death row were used for organ transplants but by then the organ trade had become so noticeably large, an explanation for the source of organs was needed. Speaking at a medical conference in Guangzhou, November 2006, Deputy Health Minister Huang Jeifu finally conceded: “Apart from a small portion of traffic victims, most of the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners,” he was quoted as saying in the book.
In admitting that organs were sourced from prisoners, Chinese authorities had revealed a gap: the number of organ transplants did not match even the highest estimations of executions in a year.
In their report, David Matas and David Kilgour identify a discrepancy of over 40,000 unexplained organ transplants between 2000-2005, dates that coincided with the rounding up and incarceration of Falun Gong practitioners.
“Our preference would have been to find the allegations to be untrue,” the authors write in the book: “ … the very horror made us reel back in disbelief. But disbelief didn’t mean that the allegations were untrue.”
Remember the Victims
There was much that countries like Australia could do to facilitate change, he told The Epoch Times after the launch, including passing resolutions, in both State and Federal parliaments, condemning illegal organ harvesting and also re-education through labour camps.
Legislation could also be passed to stop Australians going overseas to gain organs that had been obtained unethically; to ban the import of goods from labour camps; and to ban training of Chinese doctors who could not guarantee that their skills were not to be used on executed prisoners.
Our advocacy is having an impact.Australian MP’s could raise the issue with their Chinese counterparts while looking at ways to encourage ethical medical practices and the adoption of an effective organ donor scheme.—David Matas
In a reminder to us all, Mr Matas told the audience it was not only the gains made in affecting change, as small as they might appear, that drove him to continue advocating for human rights—it was the victims.
“When you are dealing with a human rights violation, your primary audience is the victims. It’s not the perpetrators, not the department of foreign affairs and not the politicians, It’s the victims,” he said.
“Standing up for human rights means standing up for the victims‚ and I think showing solidarity with the victims … is a help … whether that help materialises with prosecutions and convictions or whatever, because it helps them withstand the victimisation.”