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6. In non-emergency situations, doctors should have the right to choose to defer care to another physician for a patient who may have obtained an organ through transplant tourism. This is a third element of the Canadian policy.
7. Pharmaceutical companies should not support directly or indirectly the harvesting of organs from prisoners as part of the research and marketing of anti-rejection drugs. The Swiss section of Amnesty International on August 13, 2010, issued a statement stating that position.
8. Pharmaceutical companies should adopt common guidelines approved by independent experts to avoid complicity in abuse. This is another element of the Amnesty International August statement.
9. Pharmaceutical companies should adopt a moratorium on clinical testing of organ anti-rejection drugs in China. The global drug company Novartis announced, according to a newspaper report published August 15, 2010 , that it was adopting such a moratorium and would work to unite all pharmaceutical companies on the issue.
10. Presentations of studies involving patient data or samples from recipients of organs or tissues should not be accepted unless the presenter can satisfy the host beyond a reasonable doubt that the sourcing of the organ is not abusive. The Transplantation Society has a policy like that, but which does not address directly the issue of onus.
11. Collaboration with experimental studies should not be considered unless the foreign collaborator can satisfy the local collaborator beyond a reasonable doubt that no material is derived from abusive organ sourcing. The Transplantation Society has a policy like that too, but without reference to onus.
12. Local hospitals should not be training foreign transplant surgeons unless the local hospitals are satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the foreign doctors have not participated in and will not participate in abusive organ transplant surgery. The major transplant hospitals in Queensland, Australia, have banned training Chinese surgeons.
13. The Government of China should make transplant data publicly accessible. The Chinese health system runs four transplant registries, one each for liver, kidney, heart, and lung. Three are located in mainland China -- kidney and heart in Beijing and lung in Wuxi. The Liver Transplant Registry is located in Hong Kong. The data on the Hong Kong registry used to be publicly accessible but is no longer. The data on all sites is accessible only to those who have registry issued login names and passwords.
14. The Government of China should make public death penalty statistics. Right now China does not publish official death penalty statistics and refuses to do so. At the United Nations Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review for China in February 2009, six different countries— Canada, Switzerland, United Kingdom, France, Austria, Italy—recommended that China publish these statistics. The Government of China publicly and explicitly rejected this recommendation.
From unofficial Amnesty International death penalty statistics, there appears to be a massive discrepancy between sources of organs and volumes of transplants. Publication of death penalty and transplant statistics would either dissipate the appearance of discrepancy or require an explanation for it.
15. The international transplant community should press China to end abusive organ transplantation now, not sometime in the future. Chinese government health officials indicate that, through the spread of donations and an eventual enactment of a law allowing for sourcing of organs from the brain dead cardiac alive, the practice of sourcing organs from prisoners will cease. But in this area, ending the abuse tomorrow is not good enough. The abuse should end immediately.
David Matas is an international human rights lawyer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada.
