UN Human Rights Council Told It Has ‘Legal Obligation’ to Confront China on Forced Organ Harvesting

The United Nations Human Rights Council and U.N. member states have been told that they have a “legal obligation” to confront China over its practice of forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong adherents.

Addressing the council in Geneva on Sept. 24, London-based lawyer Hamid Sabi presented the findings from a report released in June by the China Tribunal, or the Independent Tribunal Into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China.

The tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who previously led the prosecution of former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal, concluded beyond reasonable doubt that, “in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”

Sabi said that given the evidence, the council and U.N. member states now have a “legal obligation” to address China’s “criminal conduct.”

“Forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, including the religious and ethnic minorities of Falun Gong and Uyghurs, has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale, and it continues today. This involves hundreds of thousands of victims,” Sabi explained.

Sabi pointed out that the tribunal’s conclusion of China’s crimes against humanity targeting the two groups has been “proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Main Source For China’s Transplant Industry

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice of the Buddha-school, with meditative exercises and moral teachings based on truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It became hugely popular in China by the late 1990s, with official estimates of 70 to 100 million adherents in China alone by 1999.

The practice’s popularity drew the ire of then-Chinese Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin, who believed the moral teachings were a threat to Communist rule. Jiang mobilized the state’s security, prosecutorial, and judicial systems to persecute the group beginning in July 1999.

Since then, millions of adherents have been subjected to torture, detention, brainwashing, and forced labor. They are also the principal source of organs for the Chinese regime’s extensive transplantation industry.

“Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” Sabi said.

“Organ transplantation to save life is a scientific and social triumph. But killing the donor is criminal. Governments and international bodies must do their duty not only in regard to the possible charge of genocide but also in regard to crimes against humanity, which the tribunal does not consider to be less heinous.”

Nice explained in June that doctors in China promised extraordinarily short timeframes for people seeking an organ transplant—something not possible under normal voluntary organ donation systems.

There was also consistent evidence that those incarcerated by the Chinese Communist Party were being tested to determine the state of their organs, according to Nice.

Nice said the tribunal also received direct evidence of organ harvesting, including testimony from a surgeon who was instructed to perform such organ extractions.

At a separate U.N. event on Sept. 24, Nice said their findings required immediate action.

“The time of convenient ‘uncertainty,’ when all these entities could say the case against (China) was not proved, is past,” Nice said, according to Reuters.

Also speaking at the event was Feng Hollis, a Falun Gong adherent, who was arrested in China in 2015, and later given two years of forced labor without trial.

She spoke of the unusual circumstance when she was “tested” every three to five months while being incarcerated, according to The Telegraph.

She recounted how she and other adherents were once taken to a hospital belonging to China’s re-education system. She was then subjected to a blood test, kidney ultrasound examination, electrocardiogram, urine test, and chest x-ray.

She called on the United Nations and the Transplantation Society to confront the tribunal’s findings.