David Matas: ACLM 2025 ASM, Kuala Lumpur Parliamentary Briefing and the World Conference on Bioethics – November 2025
Preventing and remedying cross border transplant abuse in Australasia
– at the Australasian College of Legal Medicine 2025 Annual Scientific Meeting, Singapore
Legislative precedents addressing cross border transplant abuse
– briefing for Parliamentarians in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
The Ethics of Interaction with Chinese Transplant Professionals
– at the World Conference on Bioethics, Medical Ethics and Health Law, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Preventing and remedying cross border transplant abuse in Australasia
(Written version of a presentation to the Australasian College of Legal Medicine 2025 Annual Scientific Meeting, Singapore, November 8, 2025)
Click HERE for the full text and footnotes/citations
Excerpt below of the Conclusion:
Australasia has a long way to go to set up a comprehensive network addressing transplant tourism and complicity in cross border organ transplant abuse. Taiwan has done the most. Australia has made active efforts to consider what should be done, so far without concrete results. There is a large number of countries in Australasia as defined above, over 60. The efforts to address these problems in this region are small.
Europe, North America and Israel provide the bulk of the examples of progress in this area. Australasian countries do not need to invent what to do. They have plenty of examples to follow. Australasian countries would be well advised to follow legislative examples, wherever they could be found.
The reaction of Madeleine Bridgett, the College and me to the existence or fear of Chinese transnational repression as the likely explanation for the behaviour of the police meant that those attending the College Meeting had a diminished appreciation of the harm inflicted in Australasia by inaction to prevent and remedy cross border transplant abuse. All the prevention and remedies proposed make sense whether China is mentioned or not. Yet, the massive, continuing killing of prisoners of conscience for their organs in China makes action urgent. Losing the ability to convey that sense of urgency in Singapore was no small matter.
Legislative precedents addressing cross border transplant abuse
(Prepared as a briefing for Parliamentarians follow a visit to Kuala Lumpur November 12th to 16th, 2025)
The Ethics of Interaction with Chinese Transplant Professionals
(Written version of remarks presented to the World Conference on Bioethics, Medical Ethics and Health Law, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 24th November 2025)
Click HERE for the full text and footnotes/citations
Excerpt below of the Conclusion:
In sum, the differences between the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation and The Transplantation Society can be explained by the reality that the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation has looked at the facts and The Transplantation Society has not. Jay Lavee, a heart transplant surgeon active in the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, has, as noted above been a published researcher on Chinese organ transplant abuse. No one in the leadership of The Transplantation Society can say the same.
As for the statement of Dr. Delmonico “I’m not here to verify, that’s not my job”, it is both onerous and superfluous to expect The Transplantation Society to replicate the research already done. But the Society should at least be familiar with it. Dr. Delmonico and others in the leadership of The Transplantation Society should at least acknowledge the efforts of a host of others to verify Chinese Communist Party assertions that the abuse has ended, efforts which show with certainty, beyond reasonable doubt, that those assertions are wrong. Without that acknowledgement, one has to conclude that, in the split between The Transplantation Society and the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation on the ethics of interaction with Chinese transplant professionals, the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation is right and The Transplantation Society is wrong.
