Brussels Conference Focuses on Forced Organ Harvesting

A conference focusing on forced organ harvesting by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was held at the Brussels Press Club on June 29th. The event was hosted by Gary Cartwright, editor of EU Today, a London based media organization.

This event invited panelists that included elected officials and human rights experts. Dignitaries present at the panel included Tomáš Zdechovský, a prominent Czech Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Nico Bijnens, president of Falun Gong Belgium, Carlos Iglesias, head of DAFOH’s legal team, Willy Fautre, founder and director of Brussels-based Human Rights Without Frontiers and Jiang Yan Hua, a Falun Gong practitioner who was imprisoned for seven years in China.

Among some of the most notable pieces of evidence presented at the conference was an audio clip of a revealing conversation between a U.S. based investigative journalist and a kidney transplant specialist at a Chinese hospital. The specialist, believing he was talking to a paying client, offered organs from donors as young as 15 years. The doctor confirmed the financial value of organs taken from Falun Gong practitioners due to their healthy lifestyle, stating that such organs cost “a little more.”

Witness testimony came from Zhang Yanhua, a Falun Gong practitioner who had suffered arrest, incarceration, and torture in China, and who had undergone constant medical tests to ascertain her suitability as an organ donor for a paying client.

Spanish lawyer Carlos Iglesias, head of the European legal team for the Universal Declaration on Combating & Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting, told the conference that the CCP is a “serial killer on a massive scale,” and that forced organ harvesting is “a crime against humanity – a real Genocide.”

Iglesias also presented a draft legislative proposal aimed at helping the 27 European Union member states to specifically criminalize organ harvesting, and to prosecute those involved in the trade. Delegates also discussed the possibility of criminalizing European citizens who travel to China in order to undergo organ transplantation.