China ‘harvesting’ organs from prisoners

This is about as appalling as it gets:

A former federal cabinet minister and a prominent lawyer will report today that they have found credible evidence that the organs of Falun Gong adherents in China are being harvested for paid transplants, and will call for international pressure to stop it.

The report, by former Liberal cabinet minister David Kilgour and Winnipeg immigration and rights lawyer David Matas, will call for international human-rights organizations to take the allegations seriously, and for governments and international bodies to shun China’s burgeoning transplant industry until it is stopped.

“Alarming is an understatement,” Mr. Kilgour said yesterday. “We simply can come to no other conclusion than that this is going on, on a large scale. That vital organs are being taken from people involuntarily in large numbers.

“All of the ‘donors’ — in quotation marks — are killed in process. Because they don’t just take one of your kidneys. From what we’ve learned, they take both of your kidneys, and anything else that anybody might want.”

Many of the alleged victims are in prisons.

And a report in the Montreal Gazette suggests that Canadians are travelling to China for these organs:

The Canadian government should revoke the passports of Canadians suspected of travelling to China for transplants and deny visas to Chinese doctors wanting to study transplants here, says a contentious report written by a former MP.

Our close relationship with China appears hypocritical yet again.

[tags]China, falun gong, medicine[/tags]