In the lead up to this month's Australia-China Human Rights Dialogue in Beijing, China, the Australian Government has been requested to make the issue of organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners in China high on the agenda.
Reading from a letter written to the Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, Falun Gong spokesperson Kay Rubacek said that Australian Falun Gong practitioners had hoped that the Australia Government would as they did at the 2006 dialogue and raise the issue of live organ harvesting with Chinese officials.
At a press conference on Friday July 6 held outside the Sydney office of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Falun Gong spokesperson Ms Rubacek read the letter written by the Falun Dafa Associations of Australia that stated "that the Australian delegates at the dialogue should be informed of the following in preparation for discussions with their Chinese Communist Party counterparts."
The first point in the letter read out by Ms Rubacek was: "UN Special Rapporteur on torture Mr Manfred Nowak notes in a March 2006 report that Falun Gong practitioners accounted for 66 per cent of the victims of alleged torture while in custody in China."
"Mr Nowak's March 2007 UN submission," Ms Rubacek read, "lists hospitals, transplants centres, detention centres and courts in China that have all been involved in either removal of organs from live Falun Gong practitioners or administering the use of these organs."
The letter also referred to the updated report, titled "Bloody Harvest", by human rights lawyer David Matas, and former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia- Pacific, David Kilgour which listed 33 strands of evidence that led them to "the regrettable conclusion that the allegations [of organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners] are true". Further points made in the letter were that the there has been no contradiction of the analysis or conclusions of the Canadian report by the Chinese authorities.
The communist regime's "response to the organ harvesting allegations was legislation that purportedly banned the sale of human organs for profit in July 2006 and 1 May 2007," the letter read.
"Yet why would such new legislation be necessary if the Chinese regime abides by the WHO 1991 Guiding Principles on Human Organ Transplants and strictly forbids the sale of human organs" as it had claimed?" asked the letter.
"In particular, the gap between the creation and enforcement of legislation under the Communist regime is widely recognised."
The letter pointed out that the Chinese authorities have refused to allow any independent investigation into the organ harvesting allegations and said that the US Consular visit to one of the reported sites of the organ harvesting "was not an investigation and only looked at one site." The letter also requested that the Australian delegates to the dialogue that the communist regime must completely end the persecution of Falun Gong and unconditionally release all Falun Gong prisoners of conscience.
Allow open access to jails, labour camps, detention centres and related hospitals for the UN and/or Coalition to Investigate Persecution of Falun Gong in China to conduct independent investigations.