The Vice-President of the European Parliament, Edward McMillan-Scott and former Canadian secretary of State, David Kilgour will press the Australian Government to further investigate the practice of forced organ removal from prisoners of conscience in China.
The pair will visit Australia as part of their global tour to call for greater transparency in Beijing's human rights issues. It will focus around the report released by Mr Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas last month, which concludes that thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have, and continue to be, executed for their organs.
Mr Kilgour and Mr McMillan-Scott's itinerary includes a briefing at Parliament House on Wednesday August 16, as well as a series of public forums and media events between August 15 and 23.
Their tour is supported by a number of concerned Federal and State MPs and will be hosted by two independent NGOs – the Edmund Rice Centre (ERC) and the National Civic Council (NCC).
Director for the ERC, Phil Glendinning told The Epoch Times he believed the tour was extremely important as the report by the two Canadians raised very serious allegations and touched on issues that the ERC had encountered through their work with Chinese refugees in Australia.
"We had anecdotal evidence of some of the issues raised in the report," Mr Glendinning said, "so it was an opportunity for us to have due deliberation of these issues and for some of these matters raised to be taken seriously and looked into."
"We believe that it is terribly important that they are put before the Australian people and we strongly support their visit."
Mr McMillan-Scott is the first Western diplomat who received first-hand accounts from persecuted Falun Gong adherents in China. He travelled to Beijing in May as a rapporteur for the EU's new Democracy and Human Rights Instrument, which will run from 2007. After meeting diplomats, academics, NGOs and individuals he concluded "if what I was told there recently by former prisoners is true, the civilised world must shun China".
"Organs from prisoners are literally being marketed with the waiting time for a transplant often now being a matter of days," he said.
President of the NCC, Peter Westmore, says the practice of demonising, imprisoning and executing a class of people in a society must be stopped but it will require a united stand from Western Governments.
"There can be few more appalling things than that a government would intentionally set out to murder its own citizens," he said
"However unless Western Governments committed to upholding human dignity, including Australia's, express their disgust to China on the subject, the present appalling practices will continue."
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