‘This lab has actively supported the CCP’s campaign of genocide through biometric data harvesting and forensic tracking,’ Sen. Rick Scott said.
A bicameral group of Republican lawmakers has proposed legislation to place a Chinese forensic police institute back on a trade sanctions list, accusing the agency of being involved in human rights violations perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The legislation, called the Confronting CCP Human Rights Abusers Act, was
introduced on May 15. The Senate bill (
S 1772) was led by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and cosponsored by Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), while the House bill
(HR 3461) was led by Reps. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) and John Moolenaar (R-Mich.).
If enacted, the legislation would redesignate the CCP’s Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science (IFS) on the Commerce Department’s entity list. The first Trump administration
placed the IFS on the list in 2020 over abuses against Uyghurs and other minority groups in China’s far-eastern region of Xinjiang.
The Biden administration
removed IFS from the sanctions list in November 2023 in a deal to get the Chinese regime to do more to halt its outflow of fentanyl precursors.
“The Chinese Communist Party’s Institute of Forensic Science plays a key role in the regime’s surveillance state, directly enabling mass internment, forced labor, and high-tech oppression of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities,” Scott said in a statement on May 15.
“This lab has actively supported the CCP’s campaign of genocide through biometric data harvesting and forensic tracking and rightly earned its spot on the Entity List years ago.
“Reinstating it on the Entity List is a critical move to stop American technology from aiding Communist China’s crimes.”
In a
post on the social media platform X in November 2023, Germany-based advocacy group World Uyghur Congress said that IFS “possesses involuntary collected DNA from millions of Uyghurs and Tibetans.”
The
Trump and
Biden administrations both formally declared that the Chinese regime’s treatment of the Uyghur minority ethnic group constituted “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”
“We must continue to hold the Chinese Communist Party Institute of Forensic Science accountable for its abusive and genocidal actions against its own people,” Blackburn said in a May 15 statement.
Blackburn added that placing the institute back on the sanctions list would affirm “the United States’ resolve to hold human rights violators accountable.”
The bill
states that two aliases of the institute, the Forensic Identification Center and the Material Identification Center, would also be added to the sanctions list.
“The Chinese Communist Party is as evil as evil gets—and its Institute of Forensic Science is no exception. From genocide and espionage to forced organ harvesting, this regime is no friend to the United States,” Ogles said in a May 15 statement.
In 2019, the independent
China Tribunal in London concluded that the CCP had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years “on a substantial scale,” with Falun Gong practitioners being the “principal source” of human organs.
The CCP has been
persecuting Falun Gong for more than two decades, subjecting its practitioners to forced labor, imprisonment, torture, and other inhuman treatment. Many practitioners have died under the regime’s brutal tactics, including being killed for their organs.
On May 7, the House
passed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (
H.R. 1503) by a vote of 406–1. If enacted, the legislation would sanction anyone implicated in the abuse, including by revoking visas and blocking U.S. property transactions. Additionally, individuals who willfully engage in the practice could face a criminal penalty of up to $1 million in fines and 20 years in prison.
