For the last three months, former Liberal cabinet minister David Kilgour has toured the world rallying support in pressuring the Chinese communist regime to stop harvesting and selling the organs of unwilling Falun Gong prisoners of conscience. He has hosted a number of forums in Australia, and won the support of the European Union, Finland, and other governments in condemning the alleged atrocities; he's even been given the opportunity to address the United Nations Human Rights Council. But back home in Canada, his own government has yet to act.
Upon his return to Canada this week from the United Nations in Geneva, Kilgour joined prominent Ottawa rabbi Reuven Bulka and MPs of all political stripes for a rally in Ottawa where he called on the Canadian government not to remain silent any longer on the issue of alleged organ harvesting from Falun Gong in China.
David Kilgour, a recently-retired Edmonton MP, is a co-author of an investigative report into the allegations that the Chinese regime is removing and selling the organs of Falun Gong prisoners, killing them in the process. The report, released on July 6th, concluded that the practice of organ harvesting from Falun Gong adherents is widespread and ongoing in China, and that Falun Gong adherents are believed to be the source for over 40,000 organ transplants in the last five years.
"Their vital organs, including hearts, kidneys, livers and corneas, were virtually simultaneously seized involuntarily," the report stated. It characterized the practice as a crime against humanity "so shocking that it represents a new form of evil in the world."
Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline with roots in ancient China, was outlawed by the Chinese regime in July, 1999, after it attracted a following estimated at over 70 million people. Since then, practitioners of Falun Gong have been subjected to arbitrary detention and torture in Chinese labour camps and prisons. Over 3,000 cases of torture deaths have been documented, while the actual number is believed to be much higher.
At the Ottawa rally this week, Rabbi Reuven Bulka called China's organ harvesting "a human rights issue probably of the highest import in the entire world right now."
Immediately after release of the investigative report in July, the Canadian government expressed its intention to investigate the allegations further. In the absence of definitive proof, however, the government has yet to take a stand on the issue.
Yet the report's co-author David Matas, a prominent human rights lawyer from Winnipeg, points out the difficulties in proving the allegations by conventional methods: "the victims are dead, their bodies cremated. The perpetrators committed crimes against humanity and are unlikely to confess, and there are no bystanders."
However, he says, the conclusions of the report and the combined strength of the evidence are irrefutable. "Every avenue of proof led us to believe that this is happening," said Matas. "Every avenue of disproof led us nowhere."
The evidence in the report includes the testimony of the wife of a former surgeon from northeast China, who says her husband removed the corneas of some 2,000 still-living Falun Gong prisoners without their consent. Investigators also extracted confessions from hospitals across China that they were use Falun Gong organs to perform transplants.
Kilgour relayed at chilling anecdote at the Ottawa rally about an exchange that took place between a Chinese surgeon and a German doctor during the World Transplant Congress in Boston this July. The surgeon from Tianjin, China boasted that hospitals in Tianjin are now performing 2,000 liver transplants annually. When the German doctor asked what the source of the organs was, the surgeon replied: "ask the [Falun Gong] demonstrators outside."
Meanwhile, other countries have taken much more decisive action.
The Australian government has asked China to allow independent investigators into the country. Earlier this month a cross-party group of Swedish MPs issued a statement calling on Sweden and the international community to investigate and stop the crimes; Finland's Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja raised the issue with China's Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing at the recent EU-Asia summit in Helsinki.
On September 8th, the European Parliament adopted a resolution condemning the detention and torture of Falun Gong practitioners, urging their immediate release and expressing concern over the reports of organ harvesting.
The Falun Dafa Association of Canada is calling on the Prime Minister to condemn the organ harvesting and to urge China to end its persecution of Falun Gong and open all detention facilities for inspection.
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