Surgeons From Chinese Communist Regime Charged with Forced Organ Removal From Living Falun Gong Practitioners

(Clearwisdom.net) Minghui/Clearwisdom correspondent Wang Ying reports that on July 24, 2006, well-known human rights lawyer Dr. Terri Marsh, representedthe class ofing Falun Gong practitioners whose organs were harvested without their voluntary consent while illegally detained in labor camps, prisons and hospitals across China, as well as their family members, filed an official criminal complaint with the United States Attorney's Office in Massachusetts charging two Chinese surgeons, Chen Zhonghua and Zhu Tongyu with suspected involvement in forced organ removal from living Falun Gong practitioners.

These two surgeons were sued while attending the 2006 World Transplant Congress in Boston. The legal documents were delivered to Chen Zhonghua on the afternoon of July 25. This was the first international human rights complaint Falun Gong practitioners had filed regarding live organ harvesting by the Chinese Communist regime.

Chen Zhonghua is Deputy Committee Director of the Chinese Medical Association Organ Transplant Division. He is also head of the Institute at Huazhong University of Science and Technology's Tongji Medical School. The other physician, Zhu Tongyu, is director of the Organ Transplant Research Center at Shanghai's Zhongshan Hospital. TheDoctors at both hospitals admitted through phone conversations that some transplant organs had come from living Falun Gong practitioners. Please refer to "Telephone Messages: Evidences of Harvesting Organs from Live Falun Gong Practitioners in China" at the website of World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) for more information. (http://www.zhuichaguoji.org/en/)

The complaint requests an investigation of doctors Chen Zhonghua and Zhu Tongyu who are suspected of performing forced organ removal from illegally detained Falun Gong practitioners.

This criminal complaint mainly charges surgeons Chen Zhonghua and Zhu Tongyu with violation of a U.S. anti-torture statute, Title 18, USC Section 2340 and with violation of the Convention Against Torture, ratified in the United States in 1994. The defendants are charged with criminal offenses as head perpetrators or accomplices in the harvesting of organs from living victims, including living Falun Gong practitioners and selling the organs for profit without the victims' consent. The harvesting of organs from living Falun Gong practitioners not only violates the anti-torture statute but is actually genocide, the most serious charge within the framework of international criminal law.

According to the first group of investigation reports recently published by the WOIPFG, Tongji Hospital Organ Transplant Research Institute under Chen Zhonghua is an important research laboratory listed by the Chinese Department of Health. This hospital performed more than 1,000 kidney transplants in February 2005 alone.

Falun Gong practitioners said the complaint itself is not their goal. What they hope for is that all medical staff members working in the organ transplant field in China would free themselves from the role of accomplices to the Chinese Communist regime by providing evidence of crimes, to help end this inhuman persecution.