Organ harvesting occurs in China, expert says

Thousands of practitioners of the Falun Gong belief system have been illegally harvested for their organs throughout China, human rights attorney David Matas said on Monday evening at a lecture hosted by Boston University’s chapter of Amnesty International.
About 30 people gathered in the College of General Studies to hear Matas give a lecture on the systematic harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners’ organs in China.
Matas said he received a report in March of 2006 reporting the murder and organ harvesting of more than 4,000 practitioners of Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual practice that involves exercise and meditation.
“I get presented with cases like this many times,” Matas said. “I usually tell these people to go to the media, or Amnesty International or even their governor. But when this request came, I knew I couldn’t say no.”
Matas said he and David Kilgour, former Canadian secretary of state for Asia-Pacific, began an extensive investigation of allegations of the organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners.

“In the beginning we had almost no data. We had to figure this on our own,” Matas said. “We had only clues, not pieces of evidence, to judge whether this was happening or not.”

By the investigation’s conclusion, he realized organ harvesting was occurring throughout China, he said. His most important sources included telephone calls with doctors, Chinese government statistics and hospital websites.

Matas said he and Kilgour pretended to be relatives of patients that needed organ transplants and asked for parts of healthy Falun Gong practitioners.

“Although most of the times this led nowhere, in about 15 percent of the calls the doctors said that they have or have had such parts,” he said.

Matas said he found many inconsistencies in hospital reports and Chinese government statistics about transplants.

“There was clearly something missing in these number,” he said said. “By interviewing many Falun Gong practitioners, we also found that they were systematically examined for blood testing while imprisoned. Nobody knew why, and nobody was even paying attention to it.”

All the evidence suggested practitioners of Falun Gong were being used for transplants, Matas said.

The Chinese government eventually said most transplants were coming from prisoners on death row but would not release further information, he said. The government released a documentary that countered their findings, by removing information from the websites of the hospitals and by initiating a wave of propaganda against them.
The results of their investigation were finally published as a report in July of 2006.

Students at the lecture said Matas’ report surprised them.

“It is so scary to see that this problem is completely under the radar of the people in the United States and even of the world as a whole,” said Dan Engel, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences.

CAS senior Shahrzad Noorbaloochi said she practices Falun Gong.

“The prosecutions are an atrocity, and the fact that nobody knows about it, and those who know are afraid to act, makes it an even more important topic of discussion.”