A high-profile Canadian team is seeking to travel to China to probe allegations that labour camps and hospitals in that country have been removing organs from prisoners of conscience for sale in the lucrative organ transplant business. They've hit a road block, however, coming up against a disobliging Chinese embassy in Ottawa.
On June 2, former secretary of state for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour and lawyer David Matas sent an official letter to the Chinese ambassador, requesting a meeting to discuss the terms of a China trip. Three weeks later, the embassy sent a staff member named Mr. Sun to meet with Kilgour.
Meeting Friday at an undisclosed location in Ottawa, Kilgour laid out his request for a visa to travel to China to investigate the reports, he says.
"The first thing I asked him was: 'Will you issue us visas?' and his answer was: 'Well, I don't deal with visas. You've got to go to the visa department. You've got to go to apply for visas,'" said Kilgour.
"This meeting was to be about whether we will get a visa or not. And he was telling me that he has nothing to do with visas, which I did not believe," Kilgour told the Chinese-language New Tang Dynasty TV after the meeting. "I mean, it is pretty much a waste of both our times. I think, in fact, I told him that."
In early May, Kilgour and Matas launched an investigation into reports that the communist regime was harvesting organs from living Falun Gong adherents detained in labour camps and hospitals, killing the victims in the process and cremating their bodies to destroy the evidence.
Conducting an onsite, independent investigation was part of their plan.
In an interview earlier this month, Matas said he and Kilgour wanted the embassy to confirm whether they would be granted the conditions required for a proper investigation.
"There's no point in just having a kind of show tour where they decide who we see and who we talk to," he said. "There needs to be a form of accessibility."
Three weeks after the chilling allegations were first publicized by the Epoch Times in March, Chinese authorities invited international observers to inspect one of the facilities — a hospital in northeast China — where it was believed that some 6,000 Falun Gong detainees had had their organs removed to be sold for profit.
In April, staff from the U.S. embassy in Beijing were given a guided tour of the hospital by Chinese authorities and said they could find no evidence of the organ harvesting, though they remained concerned about the reports. No independent investigations have been permitted by Chinese authorities.
After that, a source in the Chinese military confided in The Epoch Times that the practice of harvesting organs from detained practitioners was actually nationwide, and that a push was on to eliminate evidence following the initial media reports.
In taped conversations with Epoch Times reporters posing as potential organ transplant patients, doctors and hospital staff at facilities across the country admitted having "Falun Gong" organs, but said the supply would not last.
Matas and Kilgour want the freedom to visit facilities and meet witnesses on their own accord.
"We would be looking to go to places without it being announced in advance; we'd be looking to speak to people that we want to speak to without it being approved by the government in advance and certainly without the government being present," Matas said.
"There's a number of requirements like that, that once we're there we would in fact be free to investigate; not just presented with evidence that the government of China has itself assembled."
But if the team cannot get access to China, the investigation will continue.
"We'll just carry on with our report regardless," said Matas. "Going to China would be helpful but it is not essential, we can do this report without it and we will if necessary."
Matas told at a press conference in early May that the team would also rely on interviews with witnesses who are now outside of China, as well as phone interviews with sources in China.
EP Vice-President Interviews Witness of Organ Harvesting
Others have encountered troubles in trying to meet witnesses in China.
Edward McMillan-Scott, Vice-President of the European Parliament and founder of the EU's Democracy and Human Rights initiative, made a three-day trip to China beginning on May 21 with the intention of investigating the organ harvesting reports.
McMillan-Scott interviewed Falun Gong practitioners who had been detained in labour camps and detention centres, including 36-year-old Dong Cao. Cao testified that he'd seen the corpse of another Falun Gong adherent killed by authorities and that holes existed where his organs had been removed.
Cao has been missing since the interview. McMillan-Scott says police have raided the man's apartment and interrogated his roommate for five days.
"I have demanded an urgent meeting with the Chinese ambassador to the EU," McMillan-Scott wrote in a letter published in a U.K. newspaper. "If people in Beijing think this is the way to prepare for the Olympics they have made the wrong call."
Kilgour says a report on his team's investigation will be released July 6. He still hopes to visit China and make an onsite investigation of the claims.
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