According to new Australian research, China is suspected of removing organs from living prisoners in marginalized political groups.
It is legal in China to harvest organs from executed prisoners. But human rights groups are growing concerned that the authoritarian regime is operating on certain detainees before they are dead.
Very few people sign up to give their organs. But still, China boasts among of the quickest transplant waiting times in the world, according to News.com.au.
However, as per new research from Australian National University’s Mathew Robertson, some prisoners were likely operated on while still alive. These prisoners were generally from marginalized political groups like the Falun Gong or Urghyr Muslim communities.
American Journal of Transplantation published the research. It sought to determine whether a prisoner was categorized as “brain dead” before their organs were extracted.
“Our concern is whether the transplant surgeons establish first that the prisoners are dead before procuring their hearts and lungs,” he wrote.
In 71 papers, he discovered that ‘brain death could not have properly been declared’ in Chinese transplant journals.
“In these cases, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor’s death,” he wrote.
“Because these organ donors could have only been prisoners, our findings strongly suggest that physicians in the People‘s Republic of China have participated in executions by organ removal.”
Tip of the iceberg
In 1984, the Chinese government permitted the removal of organs from condemned convicts. It was on a condition that they gave prior agreement or if no one claimed the body.
However, in 2019, an international tribunal found that China had been forcibly removing organs from inmates, despite China’s denials.
Mr. Robertson acknowledged that his findings could represent the tip of the iceberg. Also, many more people may have died as a result of the organ retrieval procedure.
“We think that our failure to identify more brain dead death declarations violations relates to the difficulty of detecting them in the first instance, not to the absence of actual brain dead death declarations violations in either the literature or practice,” he wrote.