Joint NGO Letter to US Representatives to Vote in Favour of the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025

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Dear Representative

We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, ask you to vote in favor of HR 1503, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025, sponsored in the House by Rep. Smith (R-NJ) and Rep. Keating (D-MA).

Forced organ harvesting and organ trafficking are interlinked crimes where organs are taken from victims through coercion or without informed consent and sold illegally. This means that patients undergoing organ transplants abroad are at-risk of receiving trafficked organs.

In many countries, impoverished people are targeted and coerced to sell an organ from which the traffickers make a significant profit. The ‘donor’ is left without medical care and with significant health risks.

In China the situation is vastly different. For years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has systematically harvested the organs of prisoners of conscience, primarily Falun Gong practitioners, and there is mounting evidence of Muslim Uyghurs being targeted as well.

Since 2015, China’s organ transplantation system has claimed to only source organs from voluntary donors, but evidence demonstrates that this data has been falsified.(1) A close examination shows that Chinese hospitals have performed at least several times more transplants than even the largest estimates of death row prisoners can account for.(2)

In addition, China still does not abide by global standards of transparency in regards to organ sources, donor numbers and organ transplant operations performed, and a previous 1984 law allowing for sourcing of organs from prisoners without their consent or consent of their families if bodies are unclaimed, has not been repealed.(3)

The China Tribunal,(4) an independent, international people’s tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, lead prosecutor of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), has concluded “unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt – that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”(5) The China Tribunal’s judgment presents the first-ever independent legal analysis of all available evidence regarding forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China.

Multiple lines of evidence reviewed by the China Tribunal over 12 months included undercover phone calls to Chinese surgeons and officials who admitted that Falun Gong practitioners’ organs are available on demand.(6) Other undercover calls also provided evidence that former Chinese President Jiang Zemin issued the order to harvest organs from Falun Gong practitioners.(7) Based on the overall collective body of evidence reviewed, the China Tribunal concluded that state sanctioned forced organ harvesting in China amounts to Crimes Against Humanity.

There is also mounting evidence that the Uyghurs are now also a target for the CCP’s forced organ harvesting campaign. For years, China has been engaged in a systematic campaign of persecution and oppression against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui, and other Muslim ethnic groups from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Up to 2 million of Xinjiang’s Muslims are imprisoned in “reeducation” camps, subjected to forced labor, and recent reporting has shown that the Chinese Communist Party is also subjecting them to forced sterilization.(8) The CCP’s persecution of the Uyghurs has grown so severe that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has recently announced that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that China is responsible for crimes against humanity.”(9)

According to the report: “Organ Procurement and Extrajudicial Execution in China: A Review of the Evidence,”(10) published by Matthew Robertson, China Studies Research Fellow with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, former Uyghur detainees “now in exile have reported blood tests and physical examinations consistent with those necessary to establish organ health.” The parallel between the forced organ examinations on Uyghurs, and those forced on Falun Gong practitioners, is deeply disturbing.(11)

China has conducted a “Physicals for All” program in Xinjiang. For numerous years, this program has collected DNA samples and other data from Uyghurs, facilitating Chinese surveillance and making it easier to identify targets for organ harvesting in Xinjiang.(12,13)

In June 2021, 12 United Nations Special Procedures mandate holders raised the issue of forced organ harvesting with the Chinese Government, in response to credible information that Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims and Christians are killed for their organs in China. In the correspondence, UN human rights experts called on China to “promptly respond to the allegations of ‘organ harvesting’ and to allow independent monitoring by international human rights mechanisms.”(14)

To fight the global organ trafficking trade and to specifically address the CCP’s practice of forced organ harvesting, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025 expands the U.S. government’s powers to combat organ harvesting, imposes harsher penalties for purchasing organs, prohibits the export of organ transplant surgery devices to entities responsible for human organ trafficking, imposes sanctions on individuals and government officials in countries who support human organ trafficking and forced organ harvesting, and introduces mandatory reporting on human organ trafficking in foreign countries and on U.S. institutions which train organ transplant surgeons.

We urge you to vote in favor of HR 1503 – the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025.

Your support and passage of this legislation will ensure that the United States is combating and not complicit in the heinous practice of forced organ harvesting.

Thank you for your thoughtful consideration of this legislation.

Respectfully,

Susie Hughes
Executive Director
International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China

Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett
President
Lantos Foundation

Kristina Olney
Executive Director
The Remembrance Society

Dr. Ellen Kennedy
Executive Director
World Without Genocide

Dr. Eric Patterson
President
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

Bob Fu
Founding President
China Aid

Levi Browde
Executive Director
Falun Dafa Information Centre

Turghunjan Alawudun
President
World Uyghur Congress

Omer Kanat
Executive Director
Uyghur Human Rights Project

Rushan Abbas
Executive Director
Campaign for Uyghurs

Elfidar Iltebir
President
Uyghur American Association

Alan Adler
Executive Director
Friends of Falun Gong

FOOTNOTES

1. Robertson, Matthew P. “Analysis of official deceased organ donation data casts doubt on the credibility of China’s organ transplant reform.” BMC Medical Ethics, November 14, 2019. https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12910-019-0406-6
2. Matas, Kilgour and Gutmann. “Exposing China’s Lucrative Organ Transplant Industry.” EndTransplantAbuse.org. June 22, 2016. https://endtransplantabuse.org/an-update/
3. https://web.archive.org/web/20070504184856/http://www.laogai.org/news/newsdetail.php?id=2397
4. www.chinatribunal.com
5. https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ChinaTribunal_JUDGMENT_1stMarch_2020.pdf
6. https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/PhoneCallsVerification_AcademicCommentators_15May.pdf
7. https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Appendix-1-Investigation-Recording-of-Bai-Shuzhong-former-health-minister-of-the-General-Logistics-Department-of-the-People%E2%80%99s-Liberation-Army.pdf , https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Report-on-Forensic-Examinations-of-Recordings_Prof-French_A.pdf
8. Zenz, Adrian. “China’s Own Documents Show Potentially Genocidal Sterilization Plans in Xinjiang.” Foreign Policy. July 1, 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/01/china-documents-uighur-genocidal-sterilization-xinjiang/
9. “Simon-Skjodt Center Director Delivers Remarks on China’s Systematic Persecution of Uyghurs.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. March 6, 2020. https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-revention/blog/simon-skjodt-center-director-delivers-remarks-on-chinas-systematic-persecut
10. https://victimsofcommunism.org/publication/china-organ-procurement-report-2020/
11. https://endtransplantabuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ETAC-China-Tribunal-Testimonies_Final.pdf
12. Wee, Sui-Lee. “China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Expertise.” New York Times, February 21, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/business/china-xinjiang-uighur-dna-thermo-fisher.html
13. https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/April_Submission_Maya-Mitalipova.pdf
14. https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=27167&LangID=E