The People's Republic of China has been alleged to harvest the organs of imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners. Initial reports of organ harvesting began with the Falun Gong-affiliated Epoch Times in 2006. In a subsequent report, known as the Kilgour–Matas report, former lawmaker David Kilgour and legal counsel David Matas estimated that over 41,500 organ transplants in China were unexplained between 2000 and 2005 and suggested that the source was Falun Gong practitioners.
They updated their research in 2007 and released it as a book in 2009, receiving further media coverage. Journalist Ethan Gutmann began investigating the claims in 2006 and published his research in subsequent years. He estimated that 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners had been killed between 2000 and 2008 for their organs. In 2016, Gutmann, Kilgour, and Matas updated their research and estimated that 60,000 to 100,000 transplant surgeries were performed in China per year, far higher than its official figure.
An informal, independent tribunal initiated by an advocacy group made a final judgment in 2019 that forced organ harvesting had occurred in China on a significant scale and continued to do so, and Falun Gong practitioners are the primary source. Since 2020, Gutmann has estimated that at least 25,000 and as many as 50,000 Uyghurs are being killed every year for their organs.
These reports cite a combination of statistical analysis, interviews with former prisoners, medical authorities and public security agents, as well as more circumstantial evidence, such as the rapid growth of organ transplantation industry in China after 1999, the short wait times for recipients, the low number of known donors, the large number of Falun Gong practitioners detained and persecuted, and the profits that can be made from selling organs.
A 2006 report from the US Congressional Research Service (CRS) questioned the credibility of Kilgour-Matas's first report and stated that American officials in China were unable to verify organ harvesting allegations at a hospital in Shenyang. Dissenters have cited the allegations' inconsistency with other data, rejection by lawyers representing Falun Gong practitioners, and implausibility of the numbers.
The Chinese government has denied harvesting organs but admitted that executed prisoners were once used legally as well as illegally as a source of organs for transplantation. Its efforts to rely on voluntary donation exclusively have been met with skepticism.
Since 2006, U.N. Special Rapporteurs have called on the Chinese government to account for the sources of organs used in transplant practices. Since 2013, the European Parliament and the United States House of Representatives have adopted resolutions expressing concerns over credible reports of forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners and calling to end the practice. In 2021 U.N. human rights experts expressed alarm over credible information that minority detainees in China may be subjected to involuntary medical tests intended for organ registries. Countries have taken or considered measures to deter their citizens from travelling to China to receive transplanted organs.
Background
Organ transplantation in China
China has one of the largest organ transplant programs in the world. China Daily, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, reported that as many as 20,000 organ transplants were performed in 2006. According to the Chinese Ministry of Health, kidney transplants increased from 3,000 to 6,000 per year from 1997 to 2000, peaking at around 10,000 in 2004 before falling again. Some sources say the actual number of transplants is significantly higher based on hospital records. Wait times for obtaining vital organs in China are among the shortest in the world—often just weeks for organs such as kidneys, livers, and hearts. This has made it a destination for international transplant tourism and a venue for testing pharmaceutical anti-rejection drugs.
According to Kilgour and Matas in 2007, organ transplant recipients in China are generally not told the identity of the organ donor, nor are they provided with evidence of written consent. In some cases even the identity of the medical staff and surgeons may be withheld from patients. The problem of transparency is compounded by the lack of any ethical guidelines for the transplant profession or system of discipline for surgeons who violate ethical standards.
The Chinese government approved a regulation in 1984 to allow the removal of organs from executed criminals, provided they give prior consent or if no one claims the body. By the 1990s, growing concerns about possible abuses arising from coerced consent and corruption led medical groups and human rights organizations to start condemning China's use of prisoner organs. In 1994, an investigation by Human Rights Watch reported that "political offenders and other nonviolent criminals are used as sources for organs" and that "Chinese doctors participate in pre-execution medical tests, matching of donors with recipients, and scheduling of operations, often on a first-paid, first-served basis." In 2001, a former Chinese military surgeon testified before U.S. Congress that he had taken part in organ extraction from executed prisoners, one of whom had been shot in the head but had not died yet. As a matter of culture and custom, China had extremely low rates of voluntary organ donation. Between 2003 and 2009, only 130 people volunteered to be organ donors. In 2010, the Chinese Red Cross launched a campaign to attract voluntary organ donors in eleven provinces, but only 37 people signed up as of 2011. Further complicating the matter, as of 2011, organs could be legally collected only after cardiac death but not brain death. Due to the low levels of donation, most organs used in transplants are sourced from prisoners. Critics say that this creates a lucrative source of revenue for the Chinese medical, military and public security establishments.
Since 2005, China's Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu acknowledged on several occasions that approximately 65% of organ transplants in China were sourced from executed prisoners. In 2006, the World Medical Association demanded that China cease harvesting organs from prisoners, who are not deemed able to properly consent. When China banned organ exports to foreign countries in 2007, the price for kidneys skyrocketed in South Korea. In 2014, Huang Jiefu said that reliance on organ harvesting from death row inmates was declining, while simultaneously defending the practice of using prisoners' organs in the transplantation system.
Experts have also expressed concern that in addition to executed prisoners, non-death-row political prisoners and prisoners of conscience are also being used to supply the organ transplant industry. Researchers, including ones affiliated with The Epoch Times, the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, point out that data from China between 2010 and 2018 may have been falsified or manipulated because of "contradictory, implausible, or anomalous data artefacts" and because they match a quadratic equation with model parsimony that is one to two orders of magnitude smoother than those of other nations. Some apparently nonvoluntary donors appear to have been misclassified as voluntary. This occurs alongside voluntary organ transplant activity often incentivized by cash payments. They also report that in some cases, problematic declarations of brain death suggest that surgeons in China "executed" organ donors from 1980 to 2015.
Persecution of Falun Gong
Falun Gong is a Chinese qigong discipline involving meditation and a moral philosophy rooted in Buddhist tradition. The practice rose to popularity in the 1990s in China, and by 1998, Chinese government sources estimated that as many as 70 million people had taken up the practice. Perceiving that Falun Gong was a potential threat to the Party's authority and ideology, Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin initiated a nationwide campaign to eradicate the group in July 1999.
An extra-constitutional body called the 6-10 Office was created to lead the persecution of Falun Gong, and authorities mobilized the state media apparatus, judiciary, police force, army, education system, families, and workplaces to "struggle" against the group.
Since 1999, Falun Gong practitioners have been the targets of systematic torture, mass imprisonment, forced labour, and psychiatric abuse, all with the aim of forcing them to recant their beliefs. As of 2009, The New York Times reported that at least 2,000 Falun Gong practitioners had been killed amid the persecution campaign; Falun Gong sources documented over 3,700 named death cases by 2013. Due to the difficulty in accessing and relaying information from China, however, this may represent only a small portion of actual deaths.
Allegations, investigations, and tribunal
Epoch Times reports on Sujiatun The first allegations of large-scale organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners were published by The Epoch Times. According to its articles in early 2006, three individuals claimed knowledge of involuntary organ extractions at the Sujiatun Thrombosis Hospital in Shenyang, Liaoning province. One of the whistleblowers, the wife of a surgeon at the hospital, claimed her husband had performed numerous operations to remove the corneas of Falun Gong practitioners for transplant.
Representatives of the U.S. State Department were dispatched to the Sujiatun hospital to investigate the claims. They made two visits, first was unannounced and another a tour of the facilities and found no evidence that the hospital was used for anything other than its normal function, but said they remained concerned over China's treatment of Falun Gong and reports of organ harvesting. Soon thereafter, in May 2006, the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong asked former Canadian parliamentarian David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas to investigate the broader allegations of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China. Kilgour and Matas agreed to conduct an investigation as volunteers.
Kilgour-Matas report
David Kilgour and David Matas released the results of their preliminary investigation on 20 July 2006, in a report titled "Report into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China".US Newswire (20 July 2006) "Independent Investigators to Present Findings From Investigation on China's Organ Harvesting From Prisoners of Conscience", US Newswire. Retrieved 26 July 2006 Although the pair were denied visas to travel to China, they nonetheless compiled over 30 distinct strands of evidence which were consistent with allegations of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. These included an analysis of statistics on organ transplantation in China, interviews with former Falun Gong prisoners, and recorded admissions from Chinese hospitals and law enforcement offices about the availability of Falun Gong practitioners' organs.