Petitions to Investigate and Condemn Organ Harvesting in China Gain Momentum

166,461 signatures from 36 countries backing the Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) petition calling on the U.N. to investigate and condemn forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China. They wait in the Wagner Room of the Metropole Hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, to be taken to the U.N. Office of the High Commission for Human Rights after the panel on Organ Trafficking in China, on Dec. 17 2012. (Tanghong/The Epoch Times)

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, initially received prizes and accolades from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) when it was introduced to the public in 1992. It was banned in 1999 by then CCP leader Jiang Zemin due to his chagrin that the movement had grown bigger than the CCP.

Matas and the co-author of his book Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners in China, former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour, were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. They provided evidence that Chinese state institutions are complicit in the killing of Falun Gong prisoners for their organs. 

“No independent study has contradicted our result,” Matas wrote in his remarks for a panel on Organ Trafficking in China at the Metropole Hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, the day before delivering the petition to the United Nations. “The only disagreement we see is Chinese Communist Party propaganda.”

Matas also co-edited State Organs: Transplant Abuse in China with Dr. Torsten Trey.