A conference at the Brussels Press Club on June 29th, organised by EU Today, discussing forced organ harvesting in China heard evidence from a U.S.-based investigative journalist in which a kidney transplant specialist offered what he believed to be a paying client organs from donors as young as 15 years. The doctor confirmed the value of organs taken from Falun Gong practitioners due to their healthy lifestyle, stating that such organs cost “a little more”.
Delegates were then presented with chilling first-hand witness testimony from Zhang Yanhua, a Falun Gong practitioner who had suffered arrest, incarceration, and torture in China, and who had undergone constant medical tests to ascertain her suitability as an organ donor for a paying client. In the event, she was lucky: she was not chosen.
Spanish lawyer Carlos Iglesias – head of the European legal team of the NGO Universal Declaration on Combating & Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting told the conference that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are “serial killers on a massive scale”, and that forced organ harvesting is “a crime against humanity – a real Genocide.”
He further stated that “organ harvesting is the CCP’s ‘final solution’ for Falun Gong.”
Signor Iglesias presented a draft legislative proposal aimed at helping the 27 European Union member states to specifically criminalise organ harvesting, and to prosecute those involved in the trade, at whatever level. Delegates also discussed the possibility of criminalising European citizens who travel to China in order to undergo organ transplantation.
The sheer scale of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners was underlined by Willy Fautre, director of the Brussels-based NGO Human Rights Without Frontiers. He gave examples of prison sentences being handed out to practitioners on charges as spurious as “talking about Falun Gong in a market place.”
It is necessary that we speak about this absolutely unacceptable behaviour of Communist China… its absolutely clear that China has targeted minorities, including Falun Gong… its absolutely clear that organ harvesting is state sponsored.
Nico Bijnens, President of Falun Gong Belgium, outlined the reasons behind the ongoing persecution. He explained that by the late 1990s, when there were some 100 million Falun Gong practitioners in China, the CCP began to see the movement as a threat to its own ideology.
“In order to make Communism work in China,” he explained, the CCP had to “break up that solid, profound spiritual base…”
Since 2006, mounting evidence has suggested that prisoners of conscience are killed for their organs in China, with the brutally persecuted Buddhist practice, Falun Gong, being the primary target.
