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Former Canadian MP David Kilgour speaks at a rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa about his report into organ harvesting in China. The report concludes that the Chinese regime is stealing bodily organs from detained Falun Gong practitioners for sale in a lucrative organ trade. (Matthew Hildebrand/The Epoch Times)
He found that House Christians, Tibetans, and Uyghurs were also victims.
He was also able to prove the origin of the regime’s practice, which he will describe in an upcoming article in the Weekly Standard. “It proves that the Uyghurs were the first political prisoners to be harvested in China, in 1997 following the Gulja incident. The scale was probably fairly small, but we don’t know. What we do know is that it definitely happened,” Gutmann said.
Still, he notes that the scale of the crime appears to be highest among Falun Gong practitioners. While one piece of evidence pointed to an incident where a busload of Tibetans were subject to organ examinations, Falun Gong practitioners were often examined by the hundreds.
Uncovering a Crime
The work of Matas and Kilgour won them a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, and they continue to tour the world to reveal their findings to governments and at conferences.
The Chinese regime has since stopped openly selling organs to foreigners, yet the practice is still allowed among local Chinese. Only registered hospitals are now allowed to conduct the transplants, but Matas notes, “it only works for the civilian system, not the military, and the military are the main culprits for killing Falun Gong for their organs, so it’s not really a solution.”
Overall, the CCP’s response to the findings were “nonsensical,” as Matas describes them. “If we were wrong, the government could have very easily contradicted them. What we get is just silliness,” he said.Included among the regime’s attempts to refute the findings were a documentary by Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV, where a doctor is interviewed who had admitted to selling organs from Falun Gong practitioners in a phone call referenced in Kilgour and Matas’s research.
In the documentary, the interviewer hands him a transcript of the interview and he denies saying the parts about selling organs from Falun Gong practitioners. Matas notes that the documentary did not mention the recording of the phone call in which the doctor made his admittance—a recording that has been preserved as evidence.
Things only became more ludicrous. During a debate between Matas and a Chinese political consul at the Chinese Embassy in Israel, the Chinese official said the report was based on rumors. He tried to prove this by fabricating evidence and then refuting the evidence he created.
Matas notes that among governments and larger organizations, their findings have gotten “more acceptance as we pursue this,” adding that he and Kilgour still “haven’t seen a sustained approach in dealing with this that I would like to see.”
He believes this is partly due to the nature of the case. “You can criticize China in some ways and they’ll say ‘yes, you’re right, give us some time,’ but if you criticize them about the persecution against Falun Gong they go ballistic—they’ll walk out of the room and won’t have anything to do with you.”
According to Gutmann, “Eventually there will be either a massive reform in China or a collapse of the CCP, and very likely there will be some records still around that somebody will preserve … and people will come back and say ‘why didn’t we do anything?’ and there won’t be a good answer for that.”
