Harvesting transplant organs from executed prisoner

In 1994, Human Rights Watch/Asia issued a 42-page report that charged China with using executed prisoners as its main source for organ transplants. The report clearly demonstrated how any notion of "consent" to organ donation in China is absurd, given what it calls the "fundamentally coercive" situation in which persons condemned to undergo judicial execution are placed. The complete lack of judicial safeguards in China guarantees that many people will be wrongfully executed and become unwitting organ donors. What the report underlined most disturbingly of all was that the practice of using prisoners' organs was common.

Citing government documents, doctors' statements and medical journal articles, the report reveals cases of kidneys being removed from prisoners the night before their executions. It also cited cases where some inmates were still alive when their organs were removed, and that often executions appeared to be scheduled according to transplant needs. Some executions are known to have been deliberately botched to ensure that prisoners were not yet dead when their organs were removed. The use of condemned prisoners' organs involves members of the medical profession in the actual execution process, in violation of international standards of medical ethics. Patients requesting Chinese surgeons for transplants are often advised to wait until a major holiday, when authorities traditionally execute the most prisoners. China's preferred method of capital punishment, a bullet to the back of the head, is conducive to transplants because it does not contaminate the prisoners' organs with poisonous chemicals, as lethal injections do, or directly affect the circulatory system, as would a bullet through the heart.

This Human Rights Watch report caused a brief stir in the West but was soon forgotten. A few years ago, in New York City the police broke up a bespoke service in the sale of organs of executed prisoners organised by Chinese officials. An article in the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE on June 15, 2000 cited Dr. S.Y. Tan, one of Malaysia's leading kidney specialists, as claiming that more than 1,000 Malaysians have had kidney transplants in China from executed prisoners. Transplant patients from Thailand, Taiwan and other countries are reported to be using such services in China, and there are indications that this trend is increasing. All reports point to the absolute commercial nature of the transplant sales and affirm that organs are sold to the highest bidders, usually foreigners.

The latest report8 to date on this subject was one made in June of this year (2001) by a former Chinese Army doctor, Wang Guoqi, to a United States Congressional committee. Where he described how he removed skin and corneas from the bodies of executed prisoners. He described how injections of the anticoagulant heparin were given to the prisoners by hospital staff before the executions. After the prisoner was shot in the back of the head, transplant surgeons rushed to remove the liver, kidneys cornea and other organs either in an ambulance at the execution site or at a crematory. Dr. Wang reported that he witnessed doctors remove kidneys and other organs from victims who were still breathing. The Times article cited mounting evidence that China was selling organs from executed prisoners, sometimes to Americans. "Transplant doctors in the United States report that an increasing number of patients are showing up for post-transplant care after travelling to China for organs, particularly kidneys, that they would have to wait up to years in the West."

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