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China sale of orgrans of executed prisoners
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| shaolin_Z |
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August 1994
Vol. 6, No. 9
CHINA
ORGAN PROCUREMENT AND JUDICIAL EXECUTION IN CHINA
Introduction
In recent years, it has become increasingly evident that executed prisoners are the principal source of supply of body organs for medical transplantation purposes in China. While most observers would acknowledge the moral dilemmas implicit in this situation, the chronic shortage of voluntary organ donors around the world has led some to believe that such practices may still be justified: through their deaths, after all, condemned criminals can contribute to saving the lives of innocent victims of disease. Recent research by Human Rights Watch/Asia has uncovered, however, important new documentary and other evidence demonstrating that China's heavy reliance on executed prisoners as a source of transplant organs entails a wide range of unacceptable human rights and medical ethics violations.(1)
The obvious linkage between China's extensive use of the death penalty and the country's burgeoning organ trade and transplant program has attracted mounting international attention and alarm. In 1993, the U.N. Committee Against Torture formally asked the Chinese government "whether the death sentence might not constitute a form of cruel and unusual punishment...[and] whether the bodies of persons executed could be used for the purpose of organ transplants."(2) Later the same year, a report on the British government's first human rights delegation to China officially called upon the Chinese government to produce "a code of conduct for executions which prohibits...the use of organs from executed prisoners for spare part surgery."(3) An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 organs (mainly kidneys and corneas) from prisoners each year are used in this manner, with government officials reportedly receiving priority in their allocation.
A growing worldwide trade in human organs, whereby the poor in countries such as India and Brazil are induced to sell their body parts to meet the transplant needs of high-paying customers, largely from the developed countries, has been widely condemned because of its financially exploitative nature and its abuse of medical ethics. China's extensive use of executed prisoners as a source of organs for medical transplantation purposes, a problem which so far has received somewhat less international attention, likewise creates serious cause for concern on a number of basic human rights grounds.
The consent of prisoners to use their organs after death, although required by law, appears rarely to be sought. In some cases, prisoners and their families are not even informed that the organs will be removed, although in others, the families are given cash payments. Since the prisoner's body is cremated immediately after execution and any last written will or statement can be censored by the authorities, moreover, family members have no way of ascertaining whether or not organs have been removed.
The execution procedure prescribed by Chinese law (shooting in the back of the head), is sometimes violated in order to expedite harvesting of prisoners' organs. According to Chinese legal authorities, some executions are even deliberately mishandled to ensure that the prisoners are not yet dead when their organs are removed.
The lack of adequate judicial safeguards in China, coupled with the existence of government directives allowing political offenders and other nonviolent criminals to be sentenced to death, virtually guarantee that a significant number of wrongful executions will take place. Some of those unfairly sentenced may be unwitting organ donors.
The use of condemned prisoners' organs involves members of the medical profession in the execution process in violation of international standards of medical ethics. Chinese doctors participate in pre-execution medical tests, matching of donors with recipients and scheduling of operations, often on a first-paid, first-served basis. Surgeons are commonly present at execution grounds to perform on-site removal of vital organs.
Application of the "brain death" criterion as a standard for when life ends, a criterion now widely accepted elsewhere in the world and one likely soon to be adopted by China also, could further increase the scope of rights violations arising from the use of condemned prisoners' organs, since it is a more difficult standard to measure, and easier to falsify, than China's current heart-death standard.(4)
The practice of using executed prisoners' organs for transplant purposes creates an undesirable incentive for the authorities to refrain from either abolishing capital punishment or reducing the scope of its application.
Although many countries around the world, most notably the United States, retain the death penalty, there is a growing international consensus that capital punishment is incompatible with the right to life and and the right not to be subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.(5) Not only does China extensively resort to judicial execution, but many specific aspects of death penalty-related judicial practice in China clearly violate internationally-recognized legal standards. Even if these abuses were corrected, however, and the full requirements of due legal process were observed, the use of condemned prisoners' organs for transplant purposes would still, on account of flaws inherent in the whole concept of prisoner "consent" in this issue, be unacceptable for human rights reasons.
In this report, Human Rights Watch/Asia calls on the Chinese government to ban all further use of prisoners' organs for transplant operations, provide precise statistical data on capital punishment and executions and comply with the United Nations' "Principles of Medical Ethics" relevant to the role of the medical profession in protecting prisoners against torture and other ill-treatment. It also calls on foreign governments, especially in the Asian region, to discourage or bar their citizens from obtaining organ transplants in China and on foreign funding agencies to adopt a policy of non-participation in all Chinese government-sponsored organ transplant-related research programs. It also calls on foreign medical and pharmaceutical companies which supply goods or services to China's transplant program to cease such activity until the Chinese authorities can demonstrate that executed prisoners' organs are no longer being used for transplant purposes.
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II. Organ Procurement from Condemned Prisoners
In 1980, an official PRC medical journal titled the Journal of Chinese Organ Transplantation (now published quarterly) was established to serve the scientific research needs of the country's emerging organ-transplant community. Conspicuous by its absence in the journal is any sustained attention to the vital problem of organ sourcing - an issue that tends to dominate Western medical literature on the subject. Only rarely does one encounter discussions of possible solutions to the medical profession's difficulties, universally evident elsewhere in the world, in finding sufficient donors for organ transplant. (Those that appear focus on pleas for legal recognition of the "brain death" criterion.) Far from reflecting any abundance of organ donors in China, where demand still far exceeds supply, the lack of open medical discussion instead suggests clearly the existence of some officially imposed prohibition or taboo on the topic. Above all, in virtually none of the actual case studies discussed in the journal are the identities of the organ donors disclosed. The revealing exception to this rule is considered below.
Until recently, the Chinese government consistently denied that executed prisoners were used as a source of organs for transplant in China. The Ministry of Health, for example, made repeated statements denying all knowledge of the practice until 1991.(13) However, mounting evidence has since forced grudging admissions from Chinese government representatives that executed prisoners' organs are in fact used, although this is said to occur "only in rare instances" and "with the consent of the person" due to be executed.(14)
Clear evidence exists, however, to show that the bodies of executed prisoners are the source for many, in fact most of the organ transplant operations performed in China....
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III. Lack of Donor Consent
One of the most serious problems with China's use of executed prisoners' organs in transplant operations is that the prisoners' prior consent for organ removal is reportedly often not sought....
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IV. China's Record on Wrongful Convictions
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We discovered serious problems with regard to ninety-three of the cases, amounting to 94.3 percent of the total. Among these, sixty-seven of the convicted persons, or 68.36 percent of all the cases reviewed, were in fact completely innocent. Two persons, or 2.05 percent of the total, should have been exempted from criminal punishment. In twenty-one cases, or 21.4 percent of the total, either the wrong charges had been applied or the sentences imposed were too heavy. And in a further three cases, or 3.06 percent of the total, either the facts were unclear or the evidence was insufficient.(47)...
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VIII. The Process of Execution and Organ Removal
Chinese law requires that prisoners be executed by shooting in the back of the head, a method which allows the undamaged harvesting of such organs as kidneys and livers.(68) At the execution site, a court judge and a procuratorial official are supposed to question the condemned prisoner in order to verify that he or she is the correct person (a vital procedure referred to as yanming zhengshen: "verifying the name and checking the person") and to record any last words or wishes. If a prisoner protests that he or she has been wrongfully convicted or presents new exoneratory evidence, the procuratorial official is according to law supposed to order the execution delayed for further investigation.(69) However, other government regulations afford officials presiding over executions a loophole that allows them to ignore the prisoner's appeal, "if it is obvious that the criminal is making the...statements fraudulently."(70) There are no standards laid down for determining what is "obvious," so the decision on whether or not to delay execution remains completely discretionary. The lack of clearly defined procedures even led one official who had supervised many executions to complain, "At the most critical and important juncture, when the death sentence is finally being carried out, it seems as if there are no rules to be followed" (wu zhang ke xun). ("Some executioners," he noted, "even demand dark sunglasses, facemasks, gloves and soap" before getting down to work.)(71)
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You cen read the rest of it here. Source: Human Rights Watch
BTW, political dissenters are ALSO imprisoned and executed! WHAT THE IS THIS WORLD COMING TO! Killing people, mostly innocent people, so some rich can buy their organs and the sellers can make huge profits? We truly are a sick species. |
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| shaolin_Z |
| Now, not only is this practice unacceptable, but the fact that their customer base is largely Western is absolutely appaling. So we have a tremendous burden of responsibility to see an end to this, at least out involvment in it. |
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| Sunsnail |
| meh.. I'd rather use a chinaman's organs than die |
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| shaolin_Z |
| quote: | Originally posted by Sunsnail
meh.. I'd rather use a chinaman's organs than die |
:mad:  |
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| DJ Shibby |
Ah, this explain why they have those fun little execution vans that roll through town, and the fact that they execute people for the stupidest misdemeanors (like drug use).
They're a lot more capitalist than we ever imagined, eh? :eyes: :haha: :haha: |
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| Fir3start3r |
| Dood, this is nothing new; they've been doing this for years! |
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| Moongoose |
| quote: | Originally posted by Sunsnail
meh.. I'd rather use a chinaman's organs than die |
+1
The other guy chose death with whatever it was he did, no reason i should do the same. If i had a couple of million in the bank and im stuck on the transfer list and slowly dying here (with no guarantee that i will get the organ i need before i die) i would go for the chinese organ without hesitation. Minor guilty connscience beats no conscience at all. |
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| Fir3start3r |
So there's absolutely no thought in how those organs were harvested??
I agree with shaolin_Z.
A
big
fat
chunky
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| Sunsnail |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
So there's absolutely no thought in how those organs were harvested??
I agree with shaolin_Z.
A
big
fat
chunky
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Well, organ harvesting can't be pretty. I'd still rather live |
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| DJ Shibby |
| quote: | Originally posted by Moongoose
+1
The other guy chose death with whatever it was he did, no reason i should do the same. If i had a couple of million in the bank and im stuck on the transfer list and slowly dying here (with no guarantee that i will get the organ i need before i die) i would go for the chinese organ without hesitation. Minor guilty connscience beats no conscience at all. |
Actually, he didn't "choose" death, I'm almost certain that it was given to him by another party.
It's cute of you to label it that though in order to make yourself sleep better about the situation. :D |
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| DJ Shibby |
| quote: | Originally posted by Sunsnail
Well, organ harvesting can't be pretty. I'd still rather live |
Sure you would; but you're assuming that you will survive the operation, which will probably take place in thailand, and that the organs will sit well with you.
There's zero quality control and the health of those involved is sketchy at best... also, HOW are they being executed? With a poison? Electrocution? Suffocation?
What short and long-term effects will that have on the end product? |
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| Sunsnail |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ Shibby
Sure you would; but you're assuming that you will survive the operation, which will probably take place in thailand, and that the organs will sit well with you.
There's zero quality control and the health of those involved is sketchy at best... also, HOW are they being executed? With a poison? Electrocution? Suffocation?
What short and long-term effects will that have on the end product? |
I thought that the organs were shipped over to the US. I would have the operation in the USA. The article says that the prisoners are executed by gunshot to the head. Short and long-term effects would probably be the same as any other organ transplant. |
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