The leading medical transplant journal in the world recently made the case that Chinese prisoners are being forced to give up organs at the expense of their lives. The journal article carried this shocking headline – “Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China.”
The authors, Matthew P. Robertson and Jacob Lavee, documented 71 cases, spread across China, where organ procurement likely occurred before brain death.
“In these cases, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor’s death,” Robertson and Lavee wrote. “Because these organ donors could only have been prisoners, our findings strongly suggest that physicians in the People’s Republic of China have participated in executions by organ removal.”
Communist China has for years routinely harvested prisoners’ organs. The top transplant doctor in China admitted in 2007 that “effectively 95% of all organ transplants were from prisoners,” Robertson and Lavee wrote.
International outcry forced a supposed change in the policy in 2015, but the Chinese Communist Party left open the possibility that condemned inmates might “voluntarily” donate organs.
In practice, prisoners who are earmarked for organ donation wind up condemned.
