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Organ Harvesting from Chinese Prisoners Confirmed

by Hilary White

BEIJING, April 27, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Epoch Times International, a New York based online journal specializing in China and related issues, has confirmed through independent investigation that the Chinese communist government has been using prisoners as a source of organs for the international and domestic transplant market.

The report verifies that organs for transplantation are very plentiful and available on demand in China and are supplied from prisoners. The prisoners are killed after they are found to match a patient who is awaiting a donor organ.

Reporter Dominic Waghorn visited the Orient Organ Transplantation Center in Beijing with a hidden camera, posing as someone whose father needed a liver. Beijing’s Orient Organ Transplantation Center claimed to Waghorn that their hospital can get organs "the fastest" because it has the "best connections," with China's paramilitary police.

Waghorn said that a Dr. Zhu explained to him that when a tissue-matched liver was found, the hospital would arrange for the prisoner's execution in time for the surgery.

In December 2005, Chinese officials admitted that prisoners who were executed were used as source for organ transplants. Recent reports and The Epoch Times, however, have shown that the prisoners are executed specifically in order to procure organs. This makes inmates of China’s vast prison system, including those imprisoned for political or religious reasons, vulnerable to being used as organ farms.

In early March 2006, The Epoch Times broke the story that imprisoned members of the religious sect, Falun Gong were being used as living sources of organs for transplant patients. China also routinely rounds up and incarcerates Christians whose churches meet without official state approval.

The UK’s Times Online reported that Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu promised 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.

Human Rights advocates know, however, that such promises of reform by officials of China’s communist government are issued to soothe relations with democratic countries and rarely result in change to the system. On occasion, individual political prisoners are released as part of this public image work by communist officials. 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.

Although China is widely recognized as one of the world’s worst human rights offenders, Canada and most other western democracies continue to trade heavily with communist China. The growth in international trade has been the foundation of China’s booming economy. 

Read Epoch Times report:
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-4-26/40842.html

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
China Admits to Sale of Organs from Prisoners
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/dec/05120504.html

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