A congressional committee is urging Congress to enact laws against the Chinese government for their heinous forced organ harvesting program.
On May 10, the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) published its 2023 annual report on the state of human rights in China. The study included a number of recommendations to Congress and the Biden administration in addition to covering a broad variety of themes pertaining to Beijing's breaches of human rights.
Enacting the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act is one suggestion for Congress to consider. The Senate version of the bill, S.761, has not moved out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since it was filed in 2023. The House version of the bill, H.R.1154, was approved by a vote of 413–2 in March of last year. The primary proponent of the House measure was Rep. Chris Smtih (R-N.J.), the chairman of the CECC.
The paper states that "Congress should pass the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (H.R. 1154 / S. 761) to expand annual reporting by the State Department on the practice in China and worldwide and to impose sanctions and other penalties for anyone involved in human trafficking for the purpose of organ removal."
China's organ trade consists of state-run transplant markets that execute political prisoners in order to commit mass murder. The Chinese state has been forcefully harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years "on a substantial scale," with Falun Gong practitioners being the "principal source" of human organs, according to the 2019 China Tribunal, an independent people's tribunal in London.
Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that combines moral teachings grounded on the values of tolerance, compassion, and honesty with contemplative activities.
Following its introduction in 1992, the practice gained immense popularity; government estimates at the time indicated that there were at least 70 million practitioners by the late 1990s. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), seeing this large following as a danger, began a bloody campaign to outlaw the practice in July 1999.
Since then, the CCP has persisted in its persecution. Since then, millions of practitioners have been unlawfully held in jails, labor camps, and other institutions, with hundreds of thousands of them subjected to torture while behind bars, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
As part of its recommendation, the CECC also requested that the Biden administration collaborate with partners and allies on the matter.
Referring to the People's Republic of China, the official name of communist China, the report states, "The Administration should organize allies and partners at the U.N. Human Rights Council to support the concerns raised by U.N. human rights experts about the PRC's 'organ harvesting' practices and seek independent oversight of the PRC organ transplantation system."
Reports of alleged "organ harvesting" targeting minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims, and Christians in detention in China, alarmed a group of twelve human rights experts in 2021, including special rapporteurs to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). "Allow independent monitoring by international human rights mechanisms," the experts urged China to do.
On its website, the CECC maintains a Political Prisoner Database (PPD). The database, according to the study, includes 10,889 prisoners of conscience who were unfairly imprisoned; as of June 30 of last year, 2,615 of them were still in captivity.
"Although the overall number of political prisoners in detention is much larger, the cases documented in the PPD are reflective of broad trends of government repression," the study said.
The PPD now lists Niu Xiaona and Zhou Deyong as jailed Falun Gong practitioners. The report focused on these situations.
According to Minghui.org, a U.S.-based group that monitors the persecution campaign, Ms. Niu, a physically crippled lady from Heilongjiang Province in northern China, was sentenced to 15 years in jail in September 2022 for her beliefs. After being detained for two years, Mr. Zhou, a geological engineer, was sentenced to eight years in prison in April 2023.
Six members of the CECC, including Mr. Smith, wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month requesting that he utilize his department's incentives program to gather evidence that would bring those involved in forced organ harvesting in China responsible.
An appeal on X, previously Twitter, by the American organization Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) praised the CECC for adopting a “monumental stance” in its correspondence with Mr. Blinken. "It is a crime that has no place in our world today to remove someone is organs without their consent," DAFOH declared.
On May 10, the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) published its 2023 annual report on the state of human rights in China. The study included a number of recommendations to Congress and the Biden administration in addition to covering a broad variety of themes pertaining to Beijing's breaches of human rights.
Enacting the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act is one suggestion for Congress to consider. The Senate version of the bill, S.761, has not moved out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since it was filed in 2023. The House version of the bill, H.R.1154, was approved by a vote of 413–2 in March of last year. The primary proponent of the House measure was Rep. Chris Smtih (R-N.J.), the chairman of the CECC.
The paper states that "Congress should pass the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (H.R. 1154 / S. 761) to expand annual reporting by the State Department on the practice in China and worldwide and to impose sanctions and other penalties for anyone involved in human trafficking for the purpose of organ removal."
China's organ trade consists of state-run transplant markets that execute political prisoners in order to commit mass murder. The Chinese state has been forcefully harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years "on a substantial scale," with Falun Gong practitioners being the "principal source" of human organs, according to the 2019 China Tribunal, an independent people's tribunal in London.
Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that combines moral teachings grounded on the values of tolerance, compassion, and honesty with contemplative activities.
Following its introduction in 1992, the practice gained immense popularity; government estimates at the time indicated that there were at least 70 million practitioners by the late 1990s. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), seeing this large following as a danger, began a bloody campaign to outlaw the practice in July 1999.
Since then, the CCP has persisted in its persecution. Since then, millions of practitioners have been unlawfully held in jails, labor camps, and other institutions, with hundreds of thousands of them subjected to torture while behind bars, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
As part of its recommendation, the CECC also requested that the Biden administration collaborate with partners and allies on the matter.
Referring to the People's Republic of China, the official name of communist China, the report states, "The Administration should organize allies and partners at the U.N. Human Rights Council to support the concerns raised by U.N. human rights experts about the PRC's 'organ harvesting' practices and seek independent oversight of the PRC organ transplantation system."
Reports of alleged "organ harvesting" targeting minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims, and Christians in detention in China, alarmed a group of twelve human rights experts in 2021, including special rapporteurs to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). "Allow independent monitoring by international human rights mechanisms," the experts urged China to do.
On its website, the CECC maintains a Political Prisoner Database (PPD). The database, according to the study, includes 10,889 prisoners of conscience who were unfairly imprisoned; as of June 30 of last year, 2,615 of them were still in captivity.
"Although the overall number of political prisoners in detention is much larger, the cases documented in the PPD are reflective of broad trends of government repression," the study said.
The PPD now lists Niu Xiaona and Zhou Deyong as jailed Falun Gong practitioners. The report focused on these situations.
According to Minghui.org, a U.S.-based group that monitors the persecution campaign, Ms. Niu, a physically crippled lady from Heilongjiang Province in northern China, was sentenced to 15 years in jail in September 2022 for her beliefs. After being detained for two years, Mr. Zhou, a geological engineer, was sentenced to eight years in prison in April 2023.
Six members of the CECC, including Mr. Smith, wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month requesting that he utilize his department's incentives program to gather evidence that would bring those involved in forced organ harvesting in China responsible.
An appeal on X, previously Twitter, by the American organization Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) praised the CECC for adopting a “monumental stance” in its correspondence with Mr. Blinken. "It is a crime that has no place in our world today to remove someone is organs without their consent," DAFOH declared.
