Aired April 17, 2007
Members of a Chinese religious group are hoping that a pair of forums being held in Cleveland today will boost awareness of a disturbing human rights issue. The spiritual practice known as Falun Gong was officially banned by the Chinese government in 1999. It's claimed that practitioners are being imprisoned and executed so that their organs can be harvested and sold to transplant patients - many of them from the west. Ideastream's Lisa Ann Pinkerton reports.
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Clevelander Tainlun Jian has been practicing Falun Gong for 10 years. He describes it as [an ancient Chinese practice system for body and mind improvement], and credits the practice for healing his neck problems.
Tainlun Jian: I myself suffered physical pain in my neck for 23 years. Within three months of practice Falun Gong, it's gone without my notice.
Jian is one of the organizers of forums being held at the Intercontinental Hotel and at Case Western Reserve University. He says Falun Gong practitioners are known to be very healthy, and that he and many others believe China is using Falun Gong and other prisoners to meet a worldwide demand for organs.
Speaking at today's forums will be Canada's former Secretary of State David Kilgour. He's documented these claims in a report released last year. He cites Chinese advertisements claiming foreigners could have a new organ in a few weeks, while the wait in their host country could be years.
David Kilgour: Anyone who knows anything about transplants knows that's impossible unless you have a live inventory of quote "donors."
Kilgour and International Human Rights lawyer David Matas estimate the number of executed Falun Gong practitioners at 41,500, and say that parallels the number of organ transplants done in China from unidentified sources since 2005. Kilgour says even through his phone testimony from Chinese doctors, ex-prisoners, journalists and even "organ agents" is anecdotal, its still overwhelming.
David Kilgour: You may say you've got 33 types of proof or evidence, but I don't agree with number 18 or number 5. Well fine but what are you going to say when all 33 of them point in the same direction? It's the combination of all of these types of evidence that we've gathered which becomes overwhelming. That's lead us to the conclusion, the unavoidable conclusion, that the practice is going on.
[...]
Stewart Youngner: It's money! That's what people really care about right?
That's Stewart Youngner, a bioethics professor at Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine. He says this issue is just one more on the long list of Human Rights grievances against China. Those are trumped he says by economic issues like DVD piracy that might have more pull on Capital Hill.
Stewart Youngner: We're incredibly interdependent on China now. We have a huge debt to them and they own a lot of dollars. And I think this isn't just an issue we want to get into a fight with them about.
Youngner says the medical community is troubled by such human rights abuses, but he says there's little doctors can do. It's up to world governments, he says, to intervene.
http://www.wcpn.org/news/2007/04-06/0417organs.html