Canada rights team decries China "organ tourism"

By Randall Palmer | REUTERS | via (uncensored) yahoo.com
31 January 2007

Canada and other countries should discourage or prevent their citizens from going to China to get human organs whose "donors" may have been killed so that the organs could be harvested, a team of human rights lawyers said on Wednesday.

Former Canadian cabinet member David Kilgour decried "organ tourism," whereby rich foreigners go and pay for a transplant which, Kilgour said, may have cost a Chinese citizen his life.

The Chinese embassy in Ottawa had no immediate comment.

Kilgour and lawyer David Matas presented a report they say leads to the inescapable conclusion that Falun Gong dissidents and other prisoners in China are killed for their organs.

"Once a customer arrives into China, somebody's killed for the organ, whether it's a prisoner sentenced to death or a Falun Gong practitioner, and they just have this huge supply of people in jail waiting to be killed for organ donations," Matas told reporters.

He said that was one reason China was seeing an explosion in dedicated organ transplant facilities. The number of liver transplant facilities, for example, multiplied to 500 last year from 22 before 1999.

Matas estimated that at least 100 Canadians have gone to China for transplants although many might not know about the allegations that people are killed for their organs. He suggested Canada and other countries should issue travel advisories warning that transplants are sourced almost entirely from prisoners who do not give their consent.

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