The U.S. State Department released its annual Human Rights Report in March, highlighting major human rights violations in countries around the world. As in past years, the report lists serious ongoing violations in China where the communist regime invests significant resources into hiding its human rights abuses and silencing the Chinese people. At a press conference marking the release of the annual report, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pointed to the Chinese government’s high-tech surveillance program which enables it to monitor and identify dissents. Pompeo noted that the regime intimidates journalists into silence and that lawyers representing pro-democracy dissidents or those persecuted for their faith such as House Christians, Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs are punished with revocation of their licenses and even imprisonment.
The State Department report lists forced organ harvesting among China’s violations again this year and calls into question the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) claim it has stopped using prisoner organs for transplantation. The report cites a study by the Australian National University which detailed evidence that voluntary organ donation numbers are falsified.
One of the newest human rights concerns listed in the report is the detainment of over one million Muslim Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz people in the Xinjian region. The CCP has classified its 1,200 internment camps as vocational training centers. DAFOH has previously reported that China’s Muslims are among the prisoners of conscience being used as a living organ bank along with Falun Gong practitioners who, for the past 20 years, have been imprisoned, tissue typed and killed on demand to fuel China’s booming organ transplant industry.
This year’s Human Rights Report names specific political prisoners and prisoners of conscience including Ma Zhenyu, imprisoned for sending six letters to CCP officials asking them to help stop the persecution of Falun Gong. Another named prisoner is Bian Lichao who is serving a 12-year sentence. His wife and daughter have also been arrested under the charge of promoting Falun Gong on the internet. Last year Ma Zhenyu’s wife participated in an international religious freedom conference hosted by the State Department where she expressed her fears that her husband will be killed for his organs while imprisoned.
As pointed out by Bitter Winter, the report does include a disappointing and faulty analysis of organ harvesting in China, claiming that “There was no direct evidence of an involuntary or prisoner-based organ transplant system.” Years of research detailed by the China Tribunal, Victims of Communism Report, End Transplant Abuse in China and DAFOH points incontrovertibly to a CCP directed, nationwide, state-organized prisoner based organ transplant system.
