Chinese Organ Traders Targeted

Commissioners from the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) penned a letter to Secretarty of State Anthony Blinken asking the State Department to utilize existing rewards programs to seek information that will “deter and disrupt the market for illegally procured organs…and hold accountable those responsible for the gruesome practice” of forced organ harvesting in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The letter notes that the final judgment of the Independent People’s Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China concluded that the estimated $1 billion dollar organ trafficking industry in the PRC “harvests organs from executed prisoners and political prisoners at an industrial scale,” actions that constitute “crimes against humanity.”   

The initiative emerged from a recent CECC hearing “Stopping the Crime of Organ Harvesting—What More Must be Done” where the Commissioners heard testimony on illegal organ procurement in the PRC, the complicity of U.S. corporations in transplant abuse, and how medical associations and journals, and U.S. state legislatures, are grappling with the legal, ethical, and human rights issues associated with organ harvesting.

View the signed letter here.