In Parliament today I backed a long overdue Bill to stop the corpses of anonymous Chinese prisoners being paraded in macabre depraved money making exhibitions.
I declare my role as Vice chair of the APPGs on Uyghurs and Hong Kong and as a Patron of the Coalition for Genocide Response.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath has fearlessly shone a light on a practice which, even for the Chinese Communist Party, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of its own people, plumbs new depths of depravity. His admirable Bill deserves our wholehearted support I full endorse and agree with all the preceding speeches.
The China Tribunal said it was “certain—unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt—that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practised for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims”.
Dr Enver Tohti a Uyghur doctor described to me how he had been required to remove organs and ordered to “cut deep and work fast”, on a victim who was still alive.
The theft of organs has been described as an almost a perfect crime because no one survives. But the crime doesn’t end there. There is a further twist to this infamy. Anonymous, plastinated corpses – taken from Chinese prisons – have then been paraded in a carnival of horrors at money making exhibitions – a final sneering insult to the victims.
In 2018, after one such exhibition, I wrote to The Times with, Professor Jo Martin, President of the Royal College of Pathologists, and 55 others, and said “We believe that the legislation requires reform”. Lord Hunt’s Bill now seeks to do precisely that and he is to be warmly commended.
We should go further still. The plastinated cadavers indicate that many are young people. The Minister should establish whether it is possible to extract DNA from the corpses to discover something of their origins and their ethnic identity? The law did not require the Coroner to determine how the corposes exhibited in Birmingham had died. It should.
And what of the World Health Organisation? Will the Noble Lord the Minister tell us why the Government resisted my freedom of information request to publish its correspondence on organ harvesting with the WHO? They should press the WHO hard to lead an international campaign for legislation like this to be enacted elsewhere – combatting and ending these criminal practices.
My Lords July 22nd will mark 22 years since the start of the persecution of the Falun Gong. Jiang Zemin established the 610 Office to “eradicate” Falun Gong – practiced at the time by 70 million people. In recorded undercover phone calls during investigations, Chinese doctors said that Jiang Zemin gave direct instructions to harvest organs from Falun Gong.
Last week the CCP said it wanted Falun Gong outlawed in Hong Kong.
Lord Hunt’s Bill will demonstrate to the persecuted and the cruelly treated, the 1 million incarcerated Uyghurs, Tibetan Buddhists, imprisoned Christians, lawyers, journalists, and political dissidents – subjected to abductions, disappearances, torture, ethnic cleansing, executions and as the House of Commons determined in April – to genocide in Xinjiang – that we have not forgotten them and we will not be intimidated or remain silent. The Bill deserves a Second Reading and has my full support.
