Watchdog Group Calls on Trump, Congress to Impede China’s ‘Organ Genocide’

Frank Gaffney, vice chair of the Committee on the Present Danger: China. (Li Chen/The Epoch Times)

A response to the “organ genocide” committed by the Chinese regime is one of the 12 recommendations to President Donald Trump and the U.S. Congress by a watchdog group on May 27, in response to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) approving a National Security Law that threatens to “crush freedom” in Hong Kong.

The recommendations in their entirety seek “to defend the United States’ national interests, to protect our economic interests at home and abroad, and to secure freedom.”

“A national effort should be made to identify and act to impede the CCP’s practice of organ genocide—the international marketing and implantation of organs involuntarily and often murderously removed from members of religious and ethnic minorities, political prisoners, and others,” the Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC) stated.

Frank Gaffney, vice chairman of CPDC, told The Epoch Times that the United States should take the lead in stopping the CCP’s forced organ harvesting.

“The USCIRF’s report, as far as it goes, is further helpful confirmation of what is being done to people of faith in particular, and I believe to the Chinese people more generally, by this barbaric totalitarian regime in control of the Chinese Communist Party,” Gaffney said, referring to the 2020 annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “The more Americans are aware of it, the more they will find offensive.”

The report states, “Human rights advocates and scientists presented evidence that the practice of harvesting organs from prisoners—many of whom are believed to be Falun Gong practitioners—continued on a significant scale.” 

Gaffney also noted the “splendid work” of the China Tribunal.

That independent tribunal sitting in London concluded in June 2019 that forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale. Adherents of the spiritual practice Falun Gong have been one of the main sources of organs for transplant, according to the tribunal. 

During a rally joined by thousands of Falun Gong practitioners, demonstrators participate in an action drama in Taipei, Taiwan, on April 23, 2006. (Patrick Lin/AFP/Getty Images)

Falun Gong is a mind and body practice based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. In 1992, Falun Gong was introduced to the world in Changchun city in northeastern China and quickly gained popularity, to the point that the number of adherents exceeded the number of CCP party members, the regime’s official data showed.

On July 20, 1999, the CCP banned Falun Gong and began a violent campaign to suppress its practitioners. Since then, an unknown number of adherents have been arrested and disappeared, with their family members never hearing from them again. Many of these may be assumed to have had their organs harvested. 

Freedom House reports that hundreds of thousands of adherents have been sentenced to labor camps and prison terms, making them the largest contingent of prisoners of conscience in China.

The 160-page “Judgment” of the China Tribunal declares that the CCP’s campaign of forced organ harvesting against innocent victims is a “crime against humanity,” constituting one of the world’s “worst atrocities committed” in modern times.

The tribunal’s chairman, Sir Geoffrey Nice, led the prosecution of Slobodan Milošević, former President of Serbia, at the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. 

Documentation and investigation have fully confirmed the crimes of the CCP in conducting forced organ harvesting, and further investigation isn’t needed by the international community, Gaffney said.

Notable investigations of organ harvesting in China have included: 

• “Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China,” by David Kilgour, former Canadian secretary of state for Asia/Pacific, and international human rights lawyer David Matas, which was released July 6, 2006, and later published as the book “Bloody Harvest.” Matas called the organ harvesting “an unprecedented evil on this planet.” 
• “The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem” by Ethan Gutmann, published in 2014.
• “Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: an Update” by Gutmann, Kilgour, and Matas and published in June 2016.
• “Cold Genocide: Falun Gong in China,” by Maria Cheung, Torsten Trey, David Matas, and Richard An, published in 2018.
• “Documenting Genocide” by the China Organ Harvest Research Center, published in July 2018.
• “Organ Procurement and Extrajudicial Execution in China: A Review of the Evidence” by Matthew Robertson, published in March 2020 by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

“This is not something that I think we need to continue to investigate or study or report on,” Gaffney said. “I think this is something that—whether it’s the international elements that are enabling this thing to operate, or whether it is technologies that are being used to facilitate it, or whether it is simply a matter of just exposing it much more aggressively—my own feeling is we ought to be doing all of that. Because this is a crime against humanity on an epic scale.”

He believes that the international community should take action to help stop it.

“I think the U.S. government can play a leading role in that,” said Gaffney.

He said we also can “challenge and decry” the collaboration between Chinese and Western pharmaceutical companies, and between medical institutes in clinical studies and doctor training, which serve as indirect assistance to the organ harvesting in China.

“There are things that could be done to make this less. Hopefully, [we can] save a lot of people’s lives in China, including Falun Gong and other people who are being brutalized for this purpose.”