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David Matas on Exposing China’s Illicit Organ Trade: ‘The Problem Isn’t Too Little Evidence.’

“We’ve been lying to ourselves so long, we don’t know the truth when we see it,” says international human rights lawyer David Matas. For nearly two decades now, he has been one of the leading researchers examining the evidence of the Chinese regime harvesting the organs of living Falun Gong practitioners.

“The medical profession here in the U.S. needs to start looking at the facts and not simply accept Chinese government statements about how good they are at face value,” Matas says.

Up to now, the United States has only passed symbolic resolutions condemning the practice of forced organ harvesting. But just yesterday night, the House passed the first ever U.S. bill with actual means to hold the perpetrators accountable.

Dubbed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, H.R. 1154 aims to sanction anyone involved in forced organ trafficking and requires annual government reporting on such activities taking place in each foreign country.

Those found to be involved will face a criminal penalty of up to $1 million and 20 years in prison. If its companion bill passes the Senate, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act may soon make its way to President Biden’s desk.

“Obviously, if you kill somebody in the U.S. for their organs, you’re going to be prosecuted. It should be the same if you leave the country and then come back,” Matas says.

 

Interview trailer:



 

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek: David Matas, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

David Matas: Thanks for inviting me.

Mr. Jekielek: David, a long time ago, you once coined the phrase, “A crime yet to be seen on this planet,” if I recall correctly. This is what I want to talk about today, forced organ harvesting, how you came to discover this, and where we are today.

Mr. Matas: I’ve been doing international human rights work, more or less all my professional life. There was this woman with a pseudonym, Annie, that made a public statement, actually here in Washington, in March 2006. She said that her ex-husband had been harvesting the corneas of Falun Gong practitioners in Sujiatun Hospital in Shenyang City, Liaoning Province in China. Other doctors in the hospital had been harvesting other organs. The Falun Gong practitioners were killed through organ extraction, and their bodies were cremated. She said he was doing this between 2003 and 2005.

Then, an NGO, the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, decided to get an investigation going about what Annie said. They had a list of 20 people they thought could do the investigation. I was one of the 20. By that time I was well used to people coming to me about various human rights violations, and obviously, I can’t do everything.

I could say, “You could go to the media, you could go to your member of Parliament, you could go to a human rights NGO, you could just take a court case, and there’s other ways of dealing with this.” But I realized that this issue couldn’t be dealt with in an easy way, and there wasn’t an obvious alternative. What I’m told straight up is, “If this happens, there are no bodies, and everybody is cremated. There are no autopsies, and there’s no witnesses except the perpetrators and victims. Everything happens in a closed environment.”

“There are no documents except the Chinese hospital and government prison records, which are not accessible. There’s no crime scene. The operating room is immediately cleaned up afterwards.” Even if it’s true, how do you establish that it’s true? Obviously, when I was asked to do this, I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I also knew that it was going to take a lot of research.

It wasn’t going to be a quick and easy fix where I could suggest that someone could do this and do that. I took it not on the basis that I would try to show that what Annie said was true, but simply that I would try to come to some conclusion, one way or the other, rather than just Annie said this, and the Chinese government said that. And who knows?

What I started doing with David Kilgour was conducting evidentiary trails, specific elements that would either prove or disprove what Annie said. A lot of my prior work had to do with the Holocaust, and that’s initially what got me involved in human rights. I’m Jewish and all four of my grandparents came to Winnipeg before World War I. I wasn’t personally affected by the Holocaust, but I was well aware that if the Nazis rather than the Allied forces had won WWll, neither I nor any Jewish person would be alive today.

I knew what Annie said could be possible. Obviously, I didn’t know whether it was true, but I knew it could be possible. So, I conducted these evidentiary trials, and there were lots of them, dozens, in each direction. I was just talking to somebody recently, or was on a panel with somebody recently, who said it took him a year to go through all my research.

The conclusion that Kilgour and I reached was not the result of one particular striking piece of evidence. It was the accumulation of all the evidence that was put together. Every piece of evidence I looked at was archived, not just in translation, but in the original Chinese as well. Anybody who wants to can go through all the evidence themselves, and some people have done that. As I say, it’s a very time-consuming job.

But everybody who’s done that has come to the same conclusion that David Kilgour and I did; that this was indeed happening, and that what Annie said was true. But even we went beyond that. We didn’t say, “What Annie said was true between 2003 and 2005 in Sujiatun.” We said, “It was happening throughout China, it was happening since 2001, and it was continuing at the time of our report.” That’s basically how we started, and how we got on board.

Mr. Jekielek: You say there isn’t one particular piece of evidence which seals the deal, but were there particular pieces of evidence that took you to the next step to realize that this was real?

Mr. Matas: The Chinese government historically flipped on Falun Gong. Initially, when it started in 1992, they were encouraging it because it was beneficial to health and cut down costs in the health system. Falun Gong grew from a standing start to the point where it was more popular than the Communist Party. By the time the party switched on it in 1999, according to government estimates, there were 70 million practitioners, and according to practitioner estimates, a 100 million practitioners.

The Communist Party at that time had 60 million members. There were 3000 practice stations in Beijing because a lot of the exercises were being done outdoors, and you could see it everywhere. The party just got worried about its own popularity in the face of the popularity of Falun Gong, which at the time, wasn’t anti-communist, but was non-communist. The beliefs were not communist party beliefs.

It wasn’t political, but it was just something else. The party switched, not just switching from for to against, it switched its complete narrative. Instead of saying it’s good for health, they were saying it’s bad for health. They constructed this narrative about how awful it was.

There was this repression and this mass detention, and people who were detained. The detention was a reaction to the protest about the initial repression. Initially, within the Falun Gong community, there was complete incomprehension. The party had been encouraging it, and this exercise was good for health.

There was this belief that somehow there had been a mistake. There had been a misunderstanding, because most people are not familiar with the inner dynamics of the Communist Party. You got these protests saying Falun Gong was good as if the party had made a mistake and thought it was bad. Whereas, in fact, the Party’s problem with Falun Gong was that it was good.

You would get these mass detentions and then people would be asked to recant. If they didn’t recant voluntarily, they’d be tortured. If they recanted after torture, they’d be released. If they didn’t recant after torture, they would disappear. One of the strands of evidence was that I talked to Falun Gong practitioners who got out of detention and got out of China, “What did you see? What happened?” They told me a number of things.

At this time, some of them may have heard what Annie said, but most of them had no idea about organ harvesting. One of the things they said is that there were people who self-identified and people who didn’t self-identify. The reason was because the repression in China by the Communist Party went through stages. At first, it was simply a catch and release system.

As a policy, the repression was decided in June, and announced in July of 1999. Then, there were some protests, and there was a catch and release saying, “Don’t do it again.” But then the people who were released, their home environment would be victimized for allowing these people to practice Falun Gong. They would protest again, and this time, they wouldn’t say who they were in order to protect their home environment.

The people who got out would say, “There were all these people who didn’t self-identify. The jailers didn’t know who they were, and the family didn’t know where they were. That was an extremely vulnerable population. That was one thing.

Another thing they said was, “We were blood tested or examined, and other prisoners were not. We don’t know why.” This was actually something they weren’t volunteering. What they wanted to talk about is the torture and the abuse. But I was able to spend enough time with them to find out that this was going on as well.

It was just a complete mystery to them why this was going on. It obviously wasn’t for their health, because they were being tortured. But it’s necessary for organ transplants because you need blood type compatibility, and ideally, even tissue type compatibility. I would meet these people in different places around the world.

They hadn’t talked to each other, they hadn’t heard of organ harvesting, and they all said the same thing, “Blood tested, organ examined, just us, nobody else, and we don’t know why.” They weren’t eager to tell us about it, and wanted to talk about something else. That was something that was very striking to me, that this was happening. That was one thing.

There’s another thing that really struck me. One of the sources of evidence we had was our investigators calling into Chinese hospitals, pretending to be relatives of patients who needed a transplant and saying, “Do you have organs from Falun Gong?” This was on the basis that Falun Gong are healthy and their organs are healthy. Across China we got some admissions, “Yes, come on down, or go somewhere else, or you can find it here, but not with us.” We had all those statements.

On the statements themselves, I was prepared to say, “Maybe they’re just trying to make a sale, who knows?” But one of the things that struck me afterwards is that the Chinese government actually made a documentary about our report. It was done for Phoenix TV in Mandarin, in Hong Kong. They interviewed one of the doctors that our investigator had called, and they presented him with a transcript of the interview and they said to him, “Did you receive this call?”

He says, “Yes.” “Did you say these things?” He said, “Yes,” except for anything that mentions Falun Gong. Basically, the transcript said, “We used to do this. I actually went to prison myself and picked out these people. We’re a civilian hospital, and now the military hospital down the road is doing it exclusively. Go down there.” That was basically it.

Mr. Jekielek: This was in the documentary.

Mr. Matas: This was our conversation. They presented him with a transcript of it in the documentary. He says, “Yes, I was interviewed. Yes, I said these things except this stuff about Falun Gong.” Basically, he’s accusing us of fiddling with the transcript. But what they didn’t say in the documentary was that this just wasn’t a transcript, this was also a recording.

Playing the recording: [In Mandarin]

Mr. Matas: We have a recording, interweaving seamlessly in his own voice, the stuff he denies having said, and the stuff he admits having said. I don’t even know if that would’ve been technologically possible, but I knew very well we didn’t do that. As I said, with every piece of evidence, because the Chinese government just comes out with nonsense, I had to think of not only the arguments for it, but also the arguments against it.

I had no doubt the callers made the calls and the people at the other end said what they said. But the answer could have been, “We were just trying to make a sale, and we were making it up to please the customer,” so to speak. But they didn’t say that. They came up with such a farcical explanation, which was obviously not true.

They didn’t even have the ingenuity to think up a plausible false answer. That struck me as well. David Kilgour used to say, “In this area, there’s no smoking scalpel.” But this kind of half-admission by the doctor we interviewed was, I would say, pretty striking.

Mr. Jekielek: It’s almost unbelievable. Basically, you got independent corroboration from the doctor himself.

Mr. Matas: If you look at our data, the Chinese government says, “It’s all coming from Falun Gong.” I know that that’s not the case, because the Falun Gong community learned about this from us, rather than the other way around. Also, most of the material comes from official Chinese sources; hospital data, their statistics, and their fiddling with statistics.

This is another very odd thing. There was this Chinese doctor Sheibin Ye, who we quoted just about transplant volumes. He said, “We’ve done 90,000 transplants,” at that particular point in time, and we quoted him. The UN Special Rapporteurs on Torture and Religious Intolerance at the time, Manfred Nowak and Asma Jahangir, asked Chinese government, “What do you say about this?”

They said, “Sheibin Ye never said that.” But the actual article where he was quoted as saying it remained on a Chinese official website, right at the time when they sent in this reply to the rapporteurs. They’ve now taken it down.

It’s a rolling cover up. Every time I cite one of their sources, it disappears. Of course, I archive everything, or use the Wayback Machine, which is its own website and archives everything. The Chinese government faces a dual problem because they’re trying to do two things at once.

They want to boast about their accomplishments and transplantation. They’re selling transplants around the world. They have brokers, and they have advertisements. When we started, they had price lists. The price lists are gone, but the brokers and the advertisements are still there, and you can still see them. They’re trying to promote this business.

Mr. Jekielek: Even today?

Mr. Matas: Even today, absolutely. You look at the website Love Handy, it’s promoting transplantations in China. I should say that today there’s a big increase in Uyghurs’ organs. They’re trying to promote and boast, and yet, on the other hand, they’re trying to cover up what they’re doing. But it’s very hard to do both at the same time; talk about what they’re doing publicly, promote it publicly, advertise it publicly, and then say it isn’t happening. They leave these evidentiary trails all over the place. It’s only when they see how we’re looking at this and how it shows what they’re doing, that it disappears.

Mr. Jekielek: Do you view this as a genocide?

Mr. Matas: Yes. I actually wrote an article with Torsten Trey and Maria Cheung about this called, “A Cold Genocide.” It’s one of the reasons amongst many that this genocide hasn’t got the attention that other genocides have, because it’s a slow moving genocide. It’s not everybody being killed all at once or within a short period of time. It’s been stretching out over decades now. It started in 2001, and this is 2023. It’s been going on for 22 years now.

There was this China Tribunal and they debated on whether there was an intent to commit genocide. In my view, there is. First of all, genocide can be committed in whole or in part. Secondly, genocide can be committed with knowledge. You have the requisite intent either with knowledge or willful blindness. There was some uncertainty because people would recant, and then they wouldn’t be killed.

But my reaction to that is, the perpetrator defines the group. If the perpetrator says the recanter isn’t part of the group, then the fact is, the genocide is still being committed, and the intent to commit genocide is still there against the group.

Mr. Jekielek: Hey, everyone, I’ve got a special announcement. We’re launching a Sunday watch party series. Many of you have told us that you want to share some of our best episodes with your friends and family so they can be more informed about what’s going on. So every Sunday at 7:30 PM Eastern, we’ll be re-premiering some of our best American Thought Leaders episodes for subscribers and non-subscribers alike. It’s free to everybody. And if you have a suggestion for the next American Thought Leaders episode that you’d like to see for our Sunday watch party, tag us on Twitter at ATLSundayWatchParty, again, that’s ATLSundayWatchParty, or email us at atl@epochtimes.com. I look forward to seeing you all on the live chat this Sunday.

Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to jump in for the benefit of our audience that to call something genocide, there has to be an intent to destroy a group of people.

Mr. Matas: Yes, that’s right. It’s not just genocide. With any criminal act, you’ve got to have both the actual act and the intent to commit the act. If you cause somebody’s death, but it’s an accident, that’s not murder. But if you intend to cause somebody’s death, then it becomes murder.

Mr. Jekielek: The reason I mentioned this, because I know that part of the debate in the China Tribunal was that there is a strong profit motive, it’s a billion-dollar industry. The argument, as bizarre as it sounds, is that if it’s a profit motive, it’s not necessarily an intent to destroy a group of people. They’re just doing it for the money.

Mr. Matas: There’s two things I would say about that. One is, you’ve got to have the requisite intent, but you can have more than one intent. There’s such a thing as a mixed intent. People were making money out of the Holocaust by selling gold in teeth and stealing from the people they killed. That may have been a partial motivation, but there’s no doubt the real motivation, the primary motivation, was not that.

Also, with genocide, you’re dealing with a lot of actors, a lot of victims, but also a lot of perpetrators. The perpetrators represent a cross section of humanity with a wide range of motives. Some of them may be doing it because they’re told, some of them may be doing it because of peer pressure, and some of them may be doing it for profit.

But what’s driving this is not money. The Communist Party didn’t repress Falun Gong for money. They repressed Falun Gong because it was too popular. In their view, it threatened the hegemony of the Communist Party in China.

Mr. Jekielek: Yes. I want to touch on something you mentioned earlier. In the Holocaust, you couldn’t decide not to be Jewish. Basically, you had to live with that. According to the Nazi approach, you needed to be destroyed if you were Jewish. For Falun Gong practitioners, you can decide not to be a Falun Gong practitioner, and you can recant. For this reason, a number of people have told me it’s a completely different situation.

Mr. Matas: I would say that’s generally true of each genocide, that it has its unique characteristics. No two genocides are factually completely identical. To a certain extent, that’s what makes it harder to engage people with a new form of genocide, because it’s not like the old one. Sure that was true, but the Nazi definition of who was Jewish really didn’t have very much to do with who in reality was Jewish.

One grandparent who was Jewish, and the Nazis would say that’s enough. It’s not objectively who’s part of the group, it’s who the perpetrator sees the group is. Targeting is determined by the targeter, not by an independent outside objective observer. The Nazis were invading foreign countries to kill Jews, and the Chinese aren’t doing that, at least, not yet, to kill Falun Gong. However, one has to be worried about what they would do if they invaded Taiwan, because there are a lot of practitioners there.

What I said before is that if you leave the group because you recant, and the Chinese say, “You’re not Falun Gong anymore,” it doesn’t legally change the fact of that genocide. Because the genocide is intent to destroy the group, and if you’re not part of the group, it’s irrelevant to the issue of genocide.

Mr. Jekielek: We’ve been talking about the China Tribunal. The China Tribunal took your initial work, and there had been substantially more evidence that had been accumulated since. They looked through all of it and established yet another time that this was real, and that it was happening.

You’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years trying to get some sort of government action, and have free countries try to do something about this to make change. What is the most substantial change that you’ve seen? How difficult has it been to make this happen?

Mr. Jekielek: I was talking before about evidentiary trails, and one of the evidentiary trails we were looking at was legal and ethical standards. In this field, they didn’t exist, there was nothing anywhere. In China, they actually had laws that said you could extract organs without consent of either the person or the family. There was a 1979 law that said you could do it for research, and there was an 1984 law that said you could do it for prisoners.

It was based on finding a corpse. If you found a body and the body was unclaimed, then you could use the organs for research. With the ’79 law and ’84 law, if a prisoner’s body was unclaimed, they could use the organs without the consent of the person or the family. After a report came out, they passed a law saying consent was required, but they didn’t repeal the ’79, ’84 laws. They’re still on the books.

With ordinary legal interpretation, the specific prevails over the general. That is still in the books. Everywhere else around the world, in Canada, and in the U.S., if you kill someone for their organs, you can be prosecuted. But if you go to China and kill someone for their organs, the Chinese law doesn’t do anything about it, especially if it’s the government killing them.

The government controls the courts, the prosecutors, the investigators, the police, and the prisoners. The government is not going to do anything about it. And if you came back, the Canadian laws and the American laws didn’t have anything to say about it.

It’s the same with the ethical standards. The transplant profession and the medical profession never anticipated this. Nowhere did it say, “Don’t give people records, don’t give people prescriptions, and tell people somebody might be killed for their organs if they go to China.” The whole issue was just untouched.

David Kilgour and I are both lawyers. One of the things we try to do is advocate for a legal and ethical system that says this shouldn’t happen. Now, there are I think 19 countries which have passed extraterritorial legislation that says, “If you leave your country and go abroad and get involved in the killing of somebody for their organs and you come back, you can be prosecuted. If you’re a broker that’s advertising it, or an advertiser, or if you were actually there and doing it and then come to visit our country, you can be prosecuted.” But this is only 19 countries. There are 194 countries, and there’s still a long way to go.

The U.S and Canada just recently passed such a law last December. There’s even now an international treaty on the issue. The Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking in Human Organs, which was open for signature in 2015, has now got enough states parties that it’s enforced. Although it’s the Council of Europe, any country in the world can sign onto it. If you’re an observer state, you don’t need permission. If you’re not an observer state, you need to get approval. Costa Rica, who’s not part of the Council of Europe has signed on to it. Chile is not part of the Council of Europe, and has asked for permission.

That’s positive. In terms of ethics, Canada has developed a very good set of professional ethics on this issue now. They say, “If somebody’s going for transplant tourism, don’t try to facilitate it in any way. Don’t give them your hospital records, and don’t give them prescriptions. Advise them that treatment on return is going to be difficult.”

You were asking me earlier about striking things that happened. This is another striking thing that happened. Before we came out with our report, people who went to China for transplant tours would get letters from Chinese doctors about what they did, what medication they used, what medication they advised afterwards, a complete medical report. After our report came out, all the letters stopped.

Gizalli Aman, who’s a Malaysian doctor, pointed that out to me, and that was a problem for him, because he was dealing with these patients. The patients themselves, they had no idea what was going on. The Canadian ethics said, “When you come back, treatment is going to be very difficult, because we’re not going to know what happened, and people should be advised that somebody may be killed for their organs.”

This has happened in Canada, but as far as I know, nowhere else. In 2006, when we started our report, there was nothing. Now there’s something, but definitely not enough.

Mr. Jekielek: It’s taken an incredible amount of time and an incredible amount of effort. I myself have experienced this repeatedly even today that when you talk about this issue, some people say, “No, I just can’t accept that this is real.”

Mr. Matas: While the Holocaust was happening, there was a lot of evidence that it was happening. Many people didn’t believe it. Some of them, of course, were antisemitic and pro-Nazi, but you also had people in the Jewish community who didn’t believe it. Felix Frankfurter, who was a U.S. Supreme Court judge was presented with evidence from Jan Karski, a Polish underground worker. He met with the fellow and said, “I can’t believe it.”

The Polish diplomat who presented him says, “He’s not lying.” Frankfurter said, “I didn’t say he was lying. I just can’t believe it.” Hannah Arendt, a Jewish philosopher on totalitarianism, said at the time that she didn’t believe it. Raymond Aron, the French Jewish philosopher, said the same thing. There were a couple of people that escaped from Auschwitz, Vrba and Wetzler.

They wrote this Vrba-Wetzler Report, which is extremely detailed about the plan of Auschwitz, the physical layout of Auschwitz and what was going on. They escaped from Auschwitz while the Holocaust was still happening. There were still Jewish communities that if they’d fled, could be saved. They presented to some of these Jewish communities. Some of the Jewish people in the community read it, believed it, and fled. Some of them read it, did not believe it, stayed, and got killed.

It’s just so out of the ordinary. Obviously, when somebody develops a more powerful machine gun, you can believe that it might cause you some danger. But when somebody develops a better technique for transplantation itself, it’s hard to believe that this would be happening, because transplantation is designed for human betterment.

The basic ethic of the medical profession is do no harm. It’s just so out of the realm of everyday life. What you’ve got with China is complete denial, cover-up, obfuscation, and counter-narrative of the most implausible sort. Unfortunately, the problem isn’t too little evidence, it’s too much.

There was one doctor that I was on a panel with recently. He said, “I myself was skeptical. Then, I went through all the evidence and I was convinced, but it took me a year to do that.” Gloria Steinem said in another context, “We’ve been lying to ourselves so long we don’t know the truth when we see it.” That’s the reality of this situation. It’s so out of what they know that it’s just hard to believe.

Mr. Jekielek: To circle back to where we started, it is an evil yet to be seen on this planet.

Mr. Matas: Well, indeed. The Chinese example of killing prisoners of conscience for their organs, institutionalized, as a global business, has not been replicated anywhere else. Like anything else, you have to look at the reality in its face. You can’t just function on the basis of preconceived notions.

Mr. Jekielek: We’re sitting here right beside the U.S. Capitol. You mentioned that there are no laws on this issue in the U.S., which would seem bizarre. What would be your recommendation to Congress to help deal with this issue?

Mr. Matas: Obviously, if you kill somebody in the U.S. for the organs, you’re going to be prosecuted. It should be the same if you leave the country and then come back. If you’re involved in any way, if you’re complicit in any way, the U.S. has extraterritorial legislation in other areas. If you are a war criminal or if you’re a criminal against humanity and you commit the crimes outside of the U.S., you can be prosecuted inside the U.S. The U.S. needs a law that allows for prosecution for this offense, whether it’s committed inside or outside the U.S. That’s one thing.

In terms of ethics, there’s two categories or streams of ethics. One is doctor-patient relationship, and the other is country collaboration. Now, there’s a lot of concern within the US about collaboration with China on national security issues, and there’s a lot of focus on that. But there isn’t the same concern about collaboration with China on organ transplantation issues.

There’s a lot of doctors in this country who say that China has changed. and China has reformed. It’s basically because they’ve made some cosmetic changes without the underground reality changing. Like I mentioned, they’ve legislated saying there has to be consent, even though they haven’t repealed the law saying no consent is necessary. There wasn’t even a donor system in China for donation of organs when we did our report.

They’ve now set one up. The donor system generates tiny numbers and doesn’t explain the transplant volumes. They set up what’s called a transplant registration system where they have a ranking of priority. But the data is not there. You go to the website, and there’s nothing there. You’ve got many doctors in the U.S. saying, “Everything’s fine now,” because of this veneer, which they have refused to go behind.

I was actually at a congressional hearing with Chris Smith and Dana Rohrabacher a few years back in Washington, in that building behind me. I was there with Francis Delmonico, former head of the Transplantation Society. Chris Smith said, “China says everything is all right now, but they often say things that are not true. How do you know that what they’re saying now is true?” The answer of Francis Delmonico was, “I don’t investigate. That’s not my job.”

Soundbite of Rep. Chris Smith: In 2016, how do you independently verify, when there has been such a backdrop of terrible duplicity, lies, and deception on the part of this government? Trust and verify; how do you do it?

Soundbite of Francis Delmonico: I’m not an apologist. I’m not here to tell you not to worry. I’m not here to verify, that’s not my job. … I’m here to say to you that there is a move within the country to change.

Mr. Matas: The medical profession here in the U.S. needs to start looking at the facts and not simply accept Chinese government statements about how good they are at face value.

Narration: Up until now, the U.S. has only passed symbolic resolutions condemning the practice of forced organ harvesting. But just yesterday night, the House passed the first ever U.S. bill with actual means to hold the perpetrators accountable. Dubbed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, H.R. 1154 aims to sanction anyone involved in forced organ trafficking and requires annual government reporting on such activities taking place in each foreign country. Those found to be involved will face a criminal penalty of up to $1,000,000 and 20 years in prison. If its companion bill passes the Senate, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act may soon make its way to President Biden’s desk.

Mr. Jekielek:

Any final thoughts as we finish?

Mr. Matas: When you’re dealing with human rights violations, as I have been over the decades, I’ve come to realize it’s a never ending business, because what you’re basically dealing with is human nature. You can change technology, but human nature doesn’t change that much. And it’s not just with organ transplantation. What happens is as technology develops human nature stays the same, but the capacity both for doing harm and for doing good increases.

We see that with a myriad of technologies. Very often, people who develop the technologies don’t anticipate the harm that could be generated by the technologies they have developed. What I would say about China and Falun Gong and organ harvesting, I would hope and expect that someday it would end, and the perpetrators would be brought to justice.

But I don’t expect that human rights violations everywhere around the world will end, because the willingness and the capacity to do harm continues to exist. The details of it or the mechanics of it are going to shift with each new innovation. When we’re concerned about human rights violations, and trying to combat them, we’re not engaged in an effort of ending them completely forever around the world for all time, but we’re engaged in an effort of mitigation, making things maybe not as bad as they otherwise would have been. That’s maybe not a happy conclusion where we can all walk together hand in hand off into the sunset, but that’s the reality of the world that we face.

Mr. Jekielek: David Matas, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Matas: Thank you again for inviting me.

Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining David Matas and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.


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