China, at the beginning of this century
shot to number one in the world in terms of transplant volumes after the United States.
10,000 a year, according to the Government of China figures.
From where did all these organs come.
Official Chinese explanation was... donations.
But China did not then have an organ donation system.
In 2006, the Government of China shifted... its explanation
and said that the organs were coming...
mostly from prisoners sentenced to death and then executed.
Well, how many prisoners were there in China being sentenced to death and then executed?
The Government of China would not say.
Chinese hospitals websites...
advertised short waiting times for transplant tourists.
Transplant tourism patients going into China whom we interviewed after the transplantation
told us that they can choose their timing for transplants.
That was true even for vital organs:
Heart, liver, and lung.
Everywhere else in the world,
patients waited months and years for organs.
In China, hospitals and prisons waited for the arrival of patients
so that prisoners can be killed for their organs.
Now, not every prisoner is available as a source of organs for every patient.
Transplants require blood type compatibility
and ideally even tissue type compatibility.
Organs of donors have to be at least...
roughly the same size as the organs that are being replaced.
There's a high rate of hepatitis B in the Chinese criminal prison population,
in the order of 60%.
That makes organs of many prisoners sentenced to death and then executed
unusable for transplants.
China at that time did not have an organ distribution system.
That meant that organs were sourced locally,
from prisons in the neighborhood of the hospitals that do transplants.
Chinese law requires persons sentenced to death to be executed
within seven days of sentence.
That meant there was no pool of prisoners sentenced to death
and waiting for patients to arrive to be executed.
Put these factors together in our estimate is that
China... in order to get 10,000 organs for transplants a year,
would have had to be executing in the order of 100,000 prisoners sentenced to death every year.
That is an implausible figure,
out by more... than a factor of ten than even the wildest death penalty estimates.
Non-governmental organizations estimated that...
China, at its height, was executing maybe 5,000 a year
which is already... way more than any other country.
Over time, death penalty volume decreased.
But transplant volumes with minor variations remained... constant or even increased.
So, from where were all the organs coming?
Donations were not the answer.
Executed criminals were not the answer.
What was the answer?
Let's step back.
Let me begin with a... confession.
As a student in Paris in the late 60s,
I was actually an admirer of Mao.
I even read his little red book.
He seemed...
He seemed so... kind swimming in the famous photo in the Yangtze River.
Many historians today as I'm sure you know
named Mao one of the worst... mass murderers of the 20th century.
Chang and Halliday,
noted that "over 70 million perished under Mao's rule".
Many governance problems in China today stem from the fusion
of Mao's totalitarianism
with Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms after 1978.
But, ladies and gentlemen,
violence and corruption are the system today in China.
Every 10 years or so,
the Party starts a persecution of a minority
and mainly I think to instill fear in the general population.
Consider just three of the persecution campaigns to have gone on since 1950,
the... so-called Great Leap Forward,
or an estimated 40 million people starve to death.
The Cultural Revolution which you all know I'm sure 1966 to 1976,
perhaps another 2 million killed.
The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989,
one of my favorite photographs of all time
where soldiers killed thousands of people who are seeking openness and democracy.
So what if David and I told you that...
hundreds of thousands of innocent people have input into slave labor camps across China.
They are not only making goods for export
but they're also tortured,
blood tested,
and the unlucky ones are killed on demand for their organs,
harvested...
for profit!
So how two of us get involved in this?
About ten years ago, we were invited by a volunteer coalition
to investigate allegations of organ harvesting in China.
I have been a Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific for Canada
and David Matas have had a lifetime of working on human rights
and also trying to find lessons of the Holocaust.
So we agreed on a volunteer independent basis to look into these allegations.
What follows...
the conclusion of our investigator of reform our report is so disturbing
we have called what's happening...
a new form of evil on the planet!
That was our conclusion
that organs came from prisoners allright.
But they were not only criminal prisoners sentenced to death and then executed,
they were mostly prisoners of conscience,
primarily practitioners of the spiritually based set of exercises,
Falun Gong.
A Chinese equivalent of yoga.
Before the Communist repression of this practice,
the number of Falun Gong practitioners was in the order of 70 to 100 million people,
according to government of China figures.
They had been detained through all China in the hundreds of thousands
after the Party decided to repress the practice
out of jealousy over the popularity of Falun Gong
and fear by the Party for its ideological supremacy.
Falun Gong practitioners who recanted or released
and some of those got out of China.
We interviewed them around the world
and found out that all Falun Gong detainees
were systematically blood tested and organ examined.
This was not done for their health since they were being tortured to recant
but it is necessary for transplants
because of the need for blood type and ideally tissue type compatibility.
We had investigators calling into hospitals,
pretending to be relatives of patients who needed transplants,
and asking the hospital if they had all organs of Falun Gong practitioners for sale.
Our callers claim to want these organs because the organs were healthy,
healthy because of the Falun Gong exercises.
Through out China, we got doctors and hospitals saying...
"Yes, we do have organs of Falun Gong practitioners for sale."
Come on down.
These calls have been taped,
translated and transcribed.
Although the practice of Falun Gong is totally innocent,
the propaganda the Party's spewed out against practitioners,
demonized, depersonalized and dehumanized this population.
Their jailers thought nothing of killing them arbitrarily
because they did not consider them human.
This population provides an explanation for the numbers of transplants
that prisoners sentenced to death and executed could not.
When the persecution of Falun Gong began,
the former head of the Party Jiang Zemin vowed
"Ruin... their reputation,
bankrupt them financially,
and destroy them physically."
Falun Gong practitioners...
in China come from all walks of life,
from scientists, to soldiers, to Party officials
It is a grassroots spiritual movement
as we mentioned that grew exponentially in the 1990s.
So, let's put some faces to the faceless.
We'd like to show you a short excerpt
from the award-winning film "Free China",
an Oscar contender for the 2014 for the best documentary
that featured two... inspirational survivors of the persecution.
The main subject of the film, Jennifer
a Falun Gong practitioner.
She's a mother,
she has a Master's degree in Science and she's a former Communist Party member.
After her escape from China,
she became a best-selling author in writing about her experiences.
Not only was she jailed and tortured,
in her testimony, she recounted how she was blood tested
during her detention.
Luckily for her perhaps, she also had hepatitis
during the birth of a child and this perhaps saved her from being a so-called organ donor.
The second person you'll see...
is a Chinese - American, Dr. Charles Lee
who was jailed for three years after he went back to China
to try to explain the truth of what was happening.
He was... sentenced without anything approaching a fair trial
and send to a slave labour camp.
Let's take a look.
Every time they apply the baton on me,
I just couldn't help shaking
and the anticipating
of the next round of shocks
just... was too terrible to... describe.
This is exactly what I was forced to make
in Nanjing prison.
Homer Simpson slippers.
I saw this label
inside the prison when I was making it.
"SG Footwear, Hackensack, New Jersey."
When I was in America
I watched Homer Simpson shows,
you know, pretty often
during the 90s.
You know, very funny.
But when I was
forced to make these shoes
in prison,
you don't feel it's funny at all.
The Government of China...
was not prepared to acknowledge
that their organs for transplants were coming from prisoners of conscience.
But their acknowledgement that the organs were coming from prisoners
sentenced to death and executed was bad enough.
That admission met with global revulsion.
The Chinese transplant profession was ostracized
on different occasions denied training abroad,
publication of papers exchanges,
and presentation platform at international congresses of their colleagues.
Chinese health officials reacted by saying that,
as January this year,
they had ceased sourcing organs from prisoners and renounce sourcing organs
entirely from donors.
China created both an organ donor registry and an organ donor distribution system.
The government enacted a policy giving priority to local patients
and a law forbidding sourcing of organs without consent.
Are these changes... real or just pretense?
The answer is a bit of both.
Officials in China have said that,
prisoners can donate organs still.
If that is so then organ sourcing from prisoners continues.
There has been no abatement in the demonization of persecution of Falun Gong.
Those remain in full force
as well even blood testing of Falun Gong practitioners
continues.
Official statements do not consistently say organs sourcing from... prisoners has ended.
Some say only that it will end
and that China is now in a transition period leading to its ending.
There are in reality two systems running in China now.
A donation system and a non donation system.
Some hospitals still carry on as they always did,
albeit less blatantly than before.
The question we asked to China remains,
"From where do you get your organs for transplants?"
Chinese officials say now that all is good.
But, the records are not open to independent scrutiny.
International standards do not require
that we establish that China is doing something wrong in organ sources.
International standards rather impose a duty on China
to explain where it gets its organs for transplants.
That duty is not met just by bold assertions by Chinese authorities that everything is alright.
It is met by... transparency,
accountability and openness to scrutiny.
We say to China,
don't just tell us...
where you get your organs for transplants.
Show us!
Over the past ten years,
the evidence... has become overwhelming.
We have... 32 kinds of evidence that's happening in China.
A surgeon, Enver Tohti
has testified that he was forced to remove the organs
from a live Uyghur,
political prisoner in the mid-90s.
Organ pillaging most likely then moved to the...
...the Tibetans,
then to the Uyghurs,
and finally... to the House Christians,
and then massively to the Falun Gong community.
In 2013,
EU Parliament, to its credit,
passed a resolution where...
"expresses its deep concern over the persistent and credible reports
of systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting from large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners"
In...
2014,
Ethan Gutmann published a book:
The Slaughter,
where he interviewed over a hundred people
and collected new evidence over eight years.
He estimates that at any given time,
between 450,000 to a million Falun Gong practitioners are languishing in prisons
and slave labor camps.
He concludes, that approximately 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners
and 2,000 to 4,000 Uyghurs,
Tibetans and Christians
were killed for their organs in the 2000 to 2008 period.
His estimates regarding Falun Gong practitioners
are similar to the ones that...
David Matas and I have come up, calculated.
When you follow the money,
you partly began to understand why this is happening.
Hospitals as it shows,
can... get 62,000 for kidneys,
and heart too are worth up to 160,000.
We're talking about... billions of dollars in profits!
So all of mainstream media has paid minimal attention to these atrocities.
The truth is gradually getting out.
We want to show you in this final clip.
It's an excerpt from the documentary "Human Harvest",
which won the prestigious Peabody Award earlier this year.
The least the EU can do to stop it
is to condemn publicly
organ transplantation abuses in China,
and to inform those European citizens
who travel to China for organ transplants.
This is a crime against humanity.
We should do our best... to identify
those specific individuals who are engaged in this.
and put them on the list
of people who deserve to be brought to justice.
America must stand with the Falun Gong,
and indeed with all of the oppressed.
Beijing must release Falun Gong practitioners
and other prisoners of conscience immediately.
They theme is hidden treasures.
I think that the Hidden Treasure in all of us...
is the courage to overcome our fears
to stand for what's right no matter what the cost.
David and I are just two Davids...
and the Goliath that we face as you know is so huge.
It is indeed a daunting challenge.
This is where we need your help.
There are at least three things that all of you can do.
First, simply Google "organ harvesting in China".
Second, tell friends which you've learned.
Third, please share this information on Facebook and other social media.
Today's Internet connected world,
I believe the key is awareness...
and fundamentally, we all deserve to be free,
and we all are truly connected.
If we can reach millions to the power of community such as Ted,
we can hopefully inspire enough people...
to take action to save lives and to stop this trafficking in human organs
and which of course is also a crime against humanity.
Thank you!