The House overwhelmingly passed a bill to counter the Chinese regime’s widespread use of forced organ harvesting targeting prisoners and ethnic minorities, with the legislation receiving a vote of 413 to 2.
“Ethnic groups targeted for mass harvesting include Uyghurs who suffer from Xi Jinping’s ongoing genocide and the Falun Gong, whose peaceful meditation and exercise practices and exceptional good health make their organs highly desirable,” Representative Chris Smith, the bill’s author, on the House floor. “The Chinese Communist Party has declared them to be an ‘evil cult’ fit for butchering.”
Smith’s bill would impose sanctions on individuals and entities who facilitate forced organ harvesting or human trafficking to support the practice, which experts say continues to be employed by the Chinese authorities at a mass scale. Those sanctions would also prohibit implicated individuals from entering the U.S., and they would freeze any assets held in the U.S. It would also create new criminal penalties for involvement in organ harvesting.
While the Chinese government’s organ harvesting practices have been known internationally for decades, a series of recent, grisly findings have put the issue back on the radar for Congress.
Mass attention to the party’s systemic human rights atrocities against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang is one of these factors, owing to allegations that the Chinese authorities are harvesting the organs of prisoners in the Xinjiang detention camp system.
An academic study published in the American Journal of Transplantation last April brought to light cases in which doctors had harvested the organs of prisoners alive at the start of the operations.
“These findings show a uniquely close and long-running collaboration between the PRC’s medical establishment and its public security system,” Matthew Robertson, one of the paper’s authors, told a Congressional panel at a hearing last year. “This would make PRC surgeons, many of whom were trained in the West, involved in medicalized extrajudicial killing.”
At the same hearing, Ethan Gutmann, an expert on organ harvesting in China, said that his research led him to conclude that 25,000 to 50,000 Xinjiang detainees are killed by organ harvesting every year.
In his speech, Smith also pointed to evidence demonstrating that “elderly high ranking Chinese Communist Party officials have received replacement organs from the very people they despise and oppress at the People’s Liberation Army Hospital 301 in Beijing.”
The Senate is currently considering a version of the legislation, introduced there earlier this month by Senators Tom Cotton and Chris Coons. It already has significant bipartisan backing from several other lawmakers.