A United States senator has signed and sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling for the State Department to release information it may have about organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners in China.
Senator James M. Inhofe (R-OK), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on East Asia and Pacific Affairs, is the first Senator to send such a letter after 106 members of the House of Representatives dispatched a similar letter to Secretary Clinton last month.
As well as calling for the State Department to release information about organ transplant abuse against Falun Gong practitioners in China, the letter also asks the agency to disclose documentation about the involvement in that activity of Wang Lijun, the former police chief of Chengdu. Wang was deputy to disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai before fleeing to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu in February of this year. Chinese documents online show that Wang played an active role in harvesting thousands of organs from prisoners, which experts allege were, in large part, Falun Gong practitioners, and possibly still living while their organs were harvested.
The letter from Inhofe discusses the background of organ transplant abuse in China, and outlines the available evidence suggesting that Falun Gong prisoners have been a large source of transplant organs.
“China does not have an effective voluntary organ donation system yet it performs the second-highest number of transplants in the world: hospitals promise wait times of less than one month for vital organs,” Inhofe says in the letter. “Since 2005, persistent and credible allegations have emerged that Chinese medical professionals and security agencies collaborate to harvest forcibly the organs of prisoners, particularly Falun Gong followers.”
The State Department in its Human Rights Report on China this year made mention of the allegations for the first time.
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