Two Davids & Goliath | David Matas & David Kilgour | TEDxMünchen

David Matas & David Kilgour on "Two Davids & Goliath" at TEDxMünchen 2015 (http://www.tedxmuenchen.de)

David Kilgour is co-chair of the Canadian Friends of a Democratic Iran, past chair of the Latin America and Caribbean policy working group of the Ottawa branch of the Canadian International Council, a director of the Washington-based Council for a Community of Democracies (CCD), a Fellow of the Queen's University Centre for the Study of Democracy, a director of the New York-based NGO Advancing Human Rights and a director of the Ottawa Mission Foundation.

David Matas is an international human rights lawyer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is also an author who has produced eleven books. One of those books, titled "Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for their Organs", he co-authored with David Kilgour. As a result of the work he and David Kilgour did on that issue, an America based German doctor Torsten Trey founded the NGO Doctors against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH).

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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!