Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting issued the call ahead of the U.N.’s upcoming review of China’s human rights record.
A coalition of 110 lawmakers, doctors, academics, and civil groups are calling on the United Nations to establish an international criminal tribunal to investigate crimes of forced organ harvesting in China.
Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) issued the call this January ahead of the U.N.’s upcoming review of China’s human rights record on Jan. 23, which will mark the country’s first since 2018.
The “Universal Periodic Review“ process is a peer review mechanism that was established in 2006 alongside the creation of the U.N. Human Rights Council. All 193 U.N. member states are subjected to such a review every four to five years, conducted by the 47 U.N. Human Rights Council members and any interested U.N. member state.
The U.N. review “exists to challenge abuses and to strengthen human rights and the rule of law,” DAFOH said in a statement. “It does not exist to provide a safe haven for perpetrators of those basic rights.”
As an untold number of prisoners of conscience—mostly detained practitioners of the faith group Falun Gong, according to an investigation by the China Tribunal—die under the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) state-sanctioned crimes of forced organ harvesting, silence can only embolden perpetrators to “expand their repressive actions beyond their own borders,” DAFOH warned, noting that many Western institutions—such as training hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical organizations—have “implicitly agreed to sacrifice legal and ethical standards to cooperate with China in these mass murders.”
The CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong—a spiritual practice that encourages its adherents to live by the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance—made tens of millions of Chinese nationals targets for state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting. The vast supply of organs, forcibly taken from China’s population of incarcerated dissidents, has turned the country into a top destination for international transplant tourism. Chinese hospitals often offer short waiting times for matching organs to patients—much faster than what can be offered in developed countries with established organ donation systems that value ethical safeguards.
By Eva Fu and Frank Fang
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