Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) announced that the Foreign Affairs Committee has voted unanimously to advance his bill that aims to combat the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) practice of forcibly harvesting organs from living prisoners.
“What has become apparent through open-source investigation and witness accounts, is that there is one country—one country in particular—which is engaged in state-sponsored harvesting of human organs from otherwise healthy human beings, on a systematic and industrial scale in absolute violation of ethics governing transplantation,” Smith, co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said in a release. “That country is the People’s Republic of China under Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.”
The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023 (HR 1154) would take several actions against the CCP's state-sponsored organ harvesting industry, the release said. Smith, who has chaired 77 congressional hearings focused on CCP human rights abuses, said the Chinese government forcibly harvests organs from tens of thousands of otherwise healthy prisoners each year, killing the people in the process.
His bill is cosponsored by Reps. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Bill Keating (D-MA) and Kathy Manning (D-NC) and has been endorsed by the Campaign for Uyghurs, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the Uyghur American Association and Victims of Communism. HR 1154 would require reporting on foreign countries that traffic human beings for the purpose of harvesting their organs.
The bill would also impose sanctions on any individuals that fund or facilitate forced organ harvesting or trafficking people for that purpose, and those individuals would not be allowed to enter the U.S. or receive a visa.
“Under Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, the cruelty of murdering between 60,000 to 100,000 young victims every year—average age 28—to steal their organs is unimaginable,” Smith said. “China’s organ harvesting industry is truly barbaric.”
Smith chaired a hearing more than 20 years ago during which a Chinese security official testified that he and other agents had executed prisoners in order to remove their organs that were to be used for transplants, the release said.
“The evidence that China has been committing forced organ harvesting has been hiding in plain sight," Smith said. “People are finally waking up to the brutality of the CCP. We in the United States—in the medical field in particular—must examine our moral complicity in this most heinous of crimes.”
Smith referenced a peer-reviewed article by Dr. Jacob Lavee and Matthew Robertson, in which they documented their analysis of articles in Chinese medical journals and found more than 70 papers that "gave explicit descriptions of surgeons appearing to violate the dead donor rule while procuring hearts from prisoners. In plain language, the papers appear to show that the donors, who were prisoners, were alive at the time of surgery, and were killed by the transplant surgeons in the process of heart extraction.” In 2022, the United Nations estimated that forced organ harvesting "is an international criminal enterprise worth between $840 million and $1.7 billion," according to the release.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that more than 10,000 kidneys are sold illegally on the black market every year, ACAMS reported. That translates into one per hour. Buying and selling organs is illegal in every country except Iran, but law enforcement agencies have struggled to crack down on the trade, partly because of the international nature of the trade and partly because of a lack of domestic laws barring individuals from traveling abroad to obtain organs.
Smith, who represents New Jersey's 4th Congressional District, is a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and also serves as chairman of the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), his website says.
“My legislation is an extremely important first step, but we need a concerted effort to stop this barbaric practice—starting first and foremost with the People’s Republic of China, but secondly its global enablers,” Smith said in the release.
