by Martin Elliott
First, the China Tribunal. Evidence demonstrated that the CCP after 1999 had imprisoned thousands of people in detention camps, especially Falun Gong practitioners, solely because of their beliefs. Jiang Zemin, then president of China, announced the creation of the “610 Office,” a security agency dedicated to eradicating the Falun Gong. Jiang was worried about its size (at 70 million, it had more devotees than the party); its wide appeal, even to the upper echelons of the CCP; and its peaceful values, considered to hark back to a time of Chinese weakness. A complex structure was built to carry out this policy. The Falun Gong— along with Uyghurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese, and democratic activists—formed China’s so-called “five poisons.”
Detention was harsh and brutal, and we concluded it was beyond all reasonable doubt that the PRC had committed crimes against humanity—namely deprivation of liberty, murder, torture, rape, and other sexual violence and persecution based on racial, national, ethnic, cultural, or religious grounds.
From 1984 onward, China had carried out organ transplantation using the organs of executed prisoners. We heard evidence of surgeons being forced to remove organs from a prisoner who had deliberately been only “partially” executed. The prisoner had been shot in the right chest rather than the base of the skull, and the abdominal organs were removed in haste before death. The PRC responded to international pressure thereafter and reduced its enormous rate of execution, and hence the supply of organs for transplant should have fallen. There was no voluntary donation scheme, as in the West. Yet at the turn of the 21st century, it became CCP policy to expand transplantation nationwide to achieve a position of global leadership in the organ trade. Still, there was no voluntary donation scheme. A huge hospital construction program was undertaken, and transplant services expanded rapidly. While the Chinese authorities claimed to be performing 10,000 transplants per year between 2000 and 2010, data obtained by reviewing individual hospital websites, publications, and scientific journals—supported by phone calls between researchers—estimated that between 60,000 and 90,000 transplants were performed annually. The number of executions had fallen from 12,000 to 5,000 per year in the same time frame. This gap between available executed prisoners and transplants performed suggested that there must have been a pool of alternative donors. Could they have been sourced from detainees?
Further support for this possibility came from hospitals and transplant agents in China, which advertised bizarrely short waiting times for organ transplantation. Waiting times for a liver in the West usually exceed six months, and for kidneys one may wait two to three years for a nonrelated donor. Similarly for hearts and lungs. Many people die waiting. Chinese hospitals were advertising waiting times of days—impossible without an available pool of donors.
The China Tribunal heard a great deal of evidence from previous camp inmates not only of torture, but also of “medical tests.” These comprised blood tests, for which consent was not obtained, no purpose given, and no results reported; physical examination; and ultrasound scans, again without obvious rhyme or reason. To perform successful transplantation, the tissues of the donor and recipient must be matched to minimize the chance of rejection. Blood tests are necessary. Ultrasound scans give a good indication of structural integrity and health of an organ. Inmates were understandably very uneasy about these tests. They were never told their purpose, and some of their peers had “disappeared.” They put two and two together. We asked ourselves if there might be another rational explanation to test the inmates (a search for infection, for example, to see if they were “fit” for torture), but none was forthcoming. We concluded that forced organ harvesting had taken place and that the donor pool was likely made up of camp inmates, largely the Falun Gong.
The Uyghur Tribunal heard remarkably similar evidence, but on an even larger scale. Under direct orders from President Xi Jinping, hundreds of thousands (perhaps well over a million) Uyghurs had been detained in camps in Xinjiang in appalling conditions of cruelty, depravity, and inhumanity. Many had been tortured in the most brutal ways and over long periods of time. Inmates of both sexes had been raped or subjected to extreme sexual violence by police and by people who were paid to carry out such attacks in the camps. Solitary confinement was commonplace.
Detainees were forced to take drugs that affected reproduction, and pregnant women were forced to have abortions, even in the late stages of pregnancy. Like the Falun Gong, Uyghurs were forced to have blood tests and other medical examinations without explanation. Many people were “disappeared.” While there was no direct evidence of forced organ harvesting, it is suspected.