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China Admits to Sale of Organs from Prisoners

By Terry Vanderheyden

BEIJING, December 5, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Chinese officials have admitted to selling the organs of executed prisoners to foreign transplant recipients.

Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu admitted that the practice is common, while promising to change the policy. “We want to push for regulations on organ transplants to standardise the management of the supply of organs from executed prisoners and tidy up the medical market,” Huang said, as reported by the UK’s Times on Line.

A liver sells to a foreign recipient for approximately $41,000 USD, the Times stated. Although a religious tradition in China maintains that the body must be whole and intact in order to enter the heaven, China is second only to the US in the number of transplants performed.

Huang claimed that new guidelines being drafted would put an end to the commercial sale of organs for profit. The Times reported that transplant organs are almost exclusively derived from executed prisoners.

It would seem the Communists do not let much go to waste, as a previous LifeSiteNews.com report http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/sep/05091404.html revealed that the skin of prisoners was also sold for use in cosmetic products for export to Europe and North America.

Western human rights monitors estimate that the Chinese execute about 15,000 persons a year – more than the rest of the world's judicial executions combined. In addition, the role of defence lawyers is seriously underdeveloped and they have little impact in court cases. When appeals against the death penalty are rejected, the sentence is carried out immediately, sometimes within hours.

In addition to the enormous number of death sentences, the Chinese legal system makes use of the full array of traditional communist methods of suppression of political dissent. This includes the use of police-run “mental hospitals,” and “re-education through labour camps” where the few who have been released report regular use of torture.

China is widely recognized as one of the world’s worst human rights offenders. Canada and the US nonetheless have viewed China as a valued trade partner. Former US President Bill Clinton permanently normalized trade ties with China – without requiring that China cease its substantial human rights abuses and religious persecution – in 2000.

This year, in its annual report on Human Rights around the world, Amnesty International highlighted the abuses against women who violated the One Child policy. Such reports, however, have not deterred the United Nations, (supported by Canada) from giving its full support to the policy. The Chinese policy is largely in line – though with slightly less sqeamishness about its direct application – with the eugenic and population policies of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The UNFPA has been proven to be complicit in the Chinese policy’s violent implementation.

In addition, the communists continue to arrest Catholic priests and other Christian ministers and laypeople and to bulldoze churches, a fact that is often ignored by most mainstream media. According to official figures, there are at least 26,000 prisoners in forced labour camps. China’s 670 prisons hold some 1.5 million prisoners and the judicial system, including the death penalty is used, say some groups, as a tool by the ruling Party for terrorizing citizens.

See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Profit Triumphs Over Principles In Us-China Trade Agreement
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2000/sep/00092005.html
China Moves from Bullets to Mobile Execution Vans to Improve International Image
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/nov/05110309.html
Forced Abortion Still a Reality in China Says New Amnesty Report http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/may/05052706.html
Clinton Administration Panders To China
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/1999/mar/99030106.html
New Exposé Of Chinese ‘Gulag’ Prison Camp System
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/jan/03011005.html

See the Times coverage:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1901558,00.html

See also:
China destroys church building -16 Catholic nuns beaten by ‘government-hired gangsters’
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47681

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