A people’s tribunal in London, referred to as the China Tribunal, rendered its final judgment regarding the Chinese government’s practices of forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience. In its 556-page judgment, the 7-member panel concluded that “[f]orced organ harvesting has happened in multiple places in the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and on multiple occasions for a period of at least 20 years and continues to this day…very many people have died indescribably hideous deaths” that “beyond reasonable doubt… constitute crimes against humanity.”
The China Tribunal was formed as an independent people’s tribunal by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC). Panelists, drawn from several different countries, had expertise in international law, medicine, business and international relations. The purpose of the Tribunal was to examine the evidence of forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience in China and to investigate what criminal offenses may have been perpetrated by the Chinese government or government-supported institutions, organizations or individuals that may have engaged in forced organ harvesting.
The panel was chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, QC of the United Kingdom, who led the prosecution of Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes. In his testimony via satellite at the Policy Forum on Organ Procurement and Extrajudicial Execution in China on Capitol Hill on March 10, 2020, Nice stated that “any person or organization that interacts in any substantial way with the People’s Republic of China” should recognize that “they are interacting with a criminal state.”
The Tribunal’s report follows months of investigations which began in 2018, including testimony from more than 50 experts, first-hand accounts from former political prisoners, evidence of phone call admissions from 2018, and numerous investigative reports with statistical data derived from years of research submitted as oral accounts or documentary evidence. A total of 300 pages of witness testimonies and submissions were considered.
In their final judgment, the Tribunal released previously undisclosed evidence to support the panelists’ conclusions including: an undercover telephone call disclosing that former Chinese Communist premiere Jiang Zemin gave written orders to procure organs from Falun Gong practitioners; admission by doctors at Chinese transplantation hospitals during undercover telephone calls that organs from Falun Gong detainees have been used and are still available for transplantation; and the complete transcript of a telephone conversation with a Chinese government official who refers to himself as “the butcher,” who compares forced organ harvesting from living individuals to “slaughtering pigs . . . after scooping the organs out, I would sell them.”
The panelists noted in their report that Chinese Communist Party officials were invited to attend and address the allegations made against them but repeatedly refused to do so.
In an interview with The Daily Mail, Nice said, ‘If you had clear evidence of crimes against humanity being committed closer to home in Europe, not only would the [UK] Government act but the public would demand they act. It should not matter this is on the other side of the world.” Nice added that because there is such clear evidence of “systemic and widespread” organ harvesting in China, international organizations should investigate the question of whether or not these transplantation crimes constitute genocide.
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Tribunal panelist Arthur Waldron, a China expert and University of Pennsylvania professor, stated that since the Tribunal has concluded beyond reasonable doubt that the evidence for China’s transplant abuse is indisputable and that crimes against humanity have been committed by the Chinese regime against Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs, the next step should be the initiation of action against Beijing at the International Criminal Court.
