Prisoners' Organs Sold In China
By Kurt Samson, UPI Medical Writer
Originally published by the United Press International, June 27, 2001
WASHINGTON (UPI) — Prisoners in China who are convicted of offenses that would barely carry prison sentences in the West are being executed so their body organs, corneas and skin can be harvested and sold to a lucrative transplant market, lawmakers were told Wednesday.
The House Committee of International Relations Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights heard gruesome first-person accounts of organs and skin being removed, sometimes while prisoners still showed signs of life, and sold to benefit the military and members of the Chinese elite.
The reports were accompanied by calls for an international tribunal to pursue charges of crimes against humanity against those involved in the practice.
Wang Guoqi, a former surgeon at a Chinese Army hospital, described how he participated in harvesting skin from executed prisoners and said security and court units routinely received envelopes containing cash after each procedure.
"Acquiring skin from executed prisoners usually took place around the major holidays or during the Strike Hard campaigns when prisoners would be executed in groups," Guogi told the panel.
After he witnessed a botched execution where kidneys were removed from a prisoner and the body sent to the crematorium while still "half alive," he asked his superiors for another post—a request that was denied.
Guoqi left China in the spring of 2000, at which time, he said, "they were still harvesting organs from execution sites."
As many as 1,000 prisoners may be executed in major cities in China each year and organs sold to international buyers, foreign visitors and wealthy Chinese, the panel was told. In some instances, U.S. citizens have traveled to China for kidney transplants.
The Chinese government sanctioned organ harvesting from prisoners in 1979 and issued additional guidelines in 1984 that provided detailed instructions on conditions and procedures for harvesting organs from executed prisoners. They included the coordination among health personnel, prison staff and public security officials and the need for confidentiality in the entire process.
"This document states that those who are sentenced to death are to be executed immediately by means of shooting," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., subcommittee chairperson. "We will hear testimony about how this translates into a shot to the heart if corneas are needed and a shot to the back of the head for other organs. Family members of the executed prisoners are forced to pay for the bullets used."
As evidence of organ and tissue harvesting in Chinese prisons mounts, some Chinese transplant physicians are attending a kidney transplant conference this week in the United States, said Ros-Lehtinen, who together several other Republican members have introduced a measure that would prohibit visas or admission to the United States for any Chinese physician coming here to receive training in organ or tissue transplantation.
She said H.R. 2030 seeks to prevent U.S. funding from being used in "assisting China's heinous practice."
Michael Parmly, principal deputy assistant secretary of state, told the subcommittee the allegations against China are not new, but while difficult to confirm, the evidence "cannot be ignored."
"The lack of transparency in the Chinese criminal justice system and the secrecy that surrounds prison executions and the removal of organs makes actual documentation of the practice impossible," he said. "However, the anecdotal and circumstantial evidence regarding the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners for sale to foreigners and wealthy Chinese is substantial, credible and growing."
Harry Wu, executive director of the Laogai Research Center, a human rights organization in Milpitas, Calif., told the panel that before becoming a U.S. citizen, he was imprisoned in China.
"I spent 19 years in the Chinese Laogai camps, a place where the space between life and death is often paper thin," he testified. "I knew that if I had died in the camps, my family would never be told of my fate. My organs would have been harvested for transplantation into the body of someone else and then the rest of me tossed into a furnace as waste to be disposed of quickly."
He explained that China's "Strike Hard Campaign," launched in1983, allowed "rapid administration of justice" and heavy sentences for offenders. During the last Strike Hard Campaign in 1996, the execution rate soared to a record of 4,367, he said, and many of these prisoners' organs were gathered and sold.
"In China," he said, "the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners proceeds as an entirely government owned and controlled operation."
China's government officials play an integral role in every step of the organ harvesting procedure, he noted, from the sentencing of prisoners to death to the extraction and transplantation of their organs.
"This begins in the courtroom as judges and other court officials provide for speedy adjudication of cases and rapid turnover of death sentence appeals to ensure that a prisoner will be executed at the optimal time to harvest an organ for the waiting patient," Wu said. "Court officials often inform doctors when they pass down death sentences, alerting them to contact the prison to make a match for transplant patients."
Dr. Thomas Diflo, director of transplantation at New York University Medical Center, said several of his patients who were awaiting kidneys have returned from China with transplanted organs.
"Three years ago one of my patients who I had been following on our waiting list returned from a trip to China" he told the panel. "To my surprise, she had undergone a transplant while she was there. Her postoperative care was good and she had excellent function of the transplanted kidney. When I asked her from whom she had gotten the kidney she was vague, saying it was from a distant cousin."
In the three years since then, Diflo said he has seen a number of other patients, all young Chinese-Americans, who also received kidneys in China and were equally vague about their origin. However, recently several have admitted they received their organs "from an executed prisoner," he told the subcommittee.
