Press Release August 3, 2015 Human rights groups call upon UN to confront China’s lawless zone of forced organ harvesting

PRESS RELEASE August 3, 2015: Human rights groups call upon UN to confront China’s lawless zone of forced organ harvesting

 

At the 70th anniversary of the UN Charter, a joint open letter urges the UN High Commissioner to take action against illegal organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience

 

 

GENEVA, August 3, 2015 – Four leading global human rights advocacy groups are calling on the United Nations to use its influence to halt the practice of forced organ harvesting in China, and to coordinate global efforts aimed at making transplant medicine safe and ethical.
In an open letter from August 3, 2015Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, the Nonviolent Radical Party, Transnational and Transparty, the Swiss branches of the Society for Threatened Peoples and the International Society for Human Rights called upon His Excellency Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, UN Commissioner for Human Rights, to move from words to deeds in confronting the harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience in China, particularly from Falun Gong, Uighurs, Tibetans and Christian minority groups.
As organizations committed to preserving human rights, we are deeply concerned about forced organ harvesting – organ procurement without free, voluntary consent – from prisoners of conscience in China, which is a crime against humanity and violates the core values of the United Nations Charter,” wrote the authors.
The letter to the High Commissioner follows a June 24th seminar at the United Nations’ Palais des Nations in Geneva, which examined the trafficking of forcibly obtained human organs, a practice that international observers say continues unabated despite contrary claims from the government of the People’s Republic of China.
In addition to calling on the UN to lend its authority and resources to the global effort to end the practice in China, the groups are also requesting the creation of a working group within the United Nations dedicated to ending global abuses of transplant medicine, not limited to transplant tourism and black markets, but to include forced organ harvesting from vulnerable prisoners of conscience. Because prisoners of conscience live ostracized, they are at high risk for being used to feed the lucrative on-demand transplant market in China by disappearing into the catacombs of Chinese military hospitals. These victims have served, for more than a decade, as the foundation for the exponential transplant boom in China, which has defied all rational explanations of ethical organ procurement.
The ‘victims and the voiceless,’ who are killed for their organs in a country whose government has ratified the Charter of the United Nations, are hoping to see the light of the next day,” the groups wrote in their letter, urging in the clearest possible terms that “these crimes against humanity must end now.”
Contact:
Damon Noto, MD
Spokesperson DAFOH
+ 1-917-912-4858
[email protected]