Transnational Repression of Falun Gong by the CCP and Forced Organ Harvesting
15 July 2025: International human rights lawyer Dr. David Matas joined British lawmakers and other rights activists in a seminar at the UK Parliament, addressing the growing threat of transitional repression by the Chinese communist regime. The seminar took place ahead of a report release from the Cross-Party Joint Committee on Human Rights.
Click HERE to view further information regarding the event
In his speech at the Parliament, Matas explored the connections between the recent media and legal attacks against Shen Yun and Falun Gong, which was juxtaposed with media silence on the mass killing of Falun Gong practitioners for their organs.
Click HERE to view the full speech
Furthermore, Matas addressed a letter post-seminar to the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Arts Centre in Canada, in light of the National Arts Center’s recent refusal to allow Shen Yun Performing Arts to perform at its renowned facility in 2026.
In this letter, Matas attached the full adaptation of his speech delivered at the Parliament.
Click HERE to view the letter, which includes the full summary and references of Matas’ “House of Lords Speech”
Excerpt of the adaptation of the House of Lords speech below:
The Public Opinion Warfare and the New York Times
Shen Yun Performing Arts is a non-profit organization whose stated mission is to present “China before Communism”. Its dance performances are primarily variations on traditional Chinese dancing and music. Interspersed in each performance is one or a couple of numbers depicting in dance the persecution of Falun Gong. The success of this organization renders it primary target of CCP transnational repression.
In the last year, the Times has published at least eleven articles and one podcast critical of Shen Yun, while maintaining silence on the mass killing of Falun Gong practitioners for their organs. The Times ignored a dozen milestones on this topic, spanning almost two decades, including the release of numerous reports, books, investigate findings by the late Hon. David Kilgour and me(2), UN human rights experts and medical societies; a 2020 judgment from The China Tribunal, a people’s tribunal(3) determining that the mass killing of prisoners of conscience, primarily Falun Gong practitioners, for their organs has occurred beyond a reasonable doubt; the enactment of the Falun Gong Protection Act in May, 2025(4); and the publication of at least 5 major films and documentaries on this topic. From an objective human rights perspective, each aforementioned event was of far greater journalistic interest and significance than the essence of the complaints presented in the recent Times publications.
A former China based news reporter for the Times, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, provided an insider’s account of the Times’ editorial stance towards the topic of Falun Gong, in her written submissions to the China Tribunal,(5)
“it was my impression the New York Times, my employer at the time, was not pleased that I was pursuing these stories, and after initially tolerating my efforts made it impossible for me to continue. […] More broadly, I conducted several conversations in person or by email with senior editors but essentially my requests to continue this line of investigation – for which I’d need time – were ignored. […] Another editor commented, when I tried to broaden the investigation from death row prisoners to prisoners of conscience […] that people who believed that prisoner of conscience organs were being used were on ‘the outer fringes of advocacy’ – that is, not rational. The usual arguments were presented, for example that Falungong are irrational and unreliable, and so on. It was clear to me the issue was unwelcome. […] “
The Times’ amplification of CCP propaganda, while overlooking the vast landscape of human rights abuses against Falun Gong is consistent with its historical record. For example, the Times severely underestimated Stalinist brutality during the Holodomor, the forced starvation in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. It was not until almost 70 years later that the Times acknowledged, in 2003, that its contemporaneous coverage of those events was “taking Soviet propaganda at face value”, “complete misleading”, and “dismissed more diligent writers’ reports that people were starving.”(6)
Another example is the Holocaust. A 2005 book review of “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper”, catalogues “how little attention the Holocaust received in The Times and how, when it was covered, the stories were generally buried in backpages.”(7)
The Times, given its prestige, historic disregard of mass atrocities and deference towards state perpetrators, including the CCP, is the optimal vehicle for Xi’s public opinion warfare.
Footnotes from the excerpt above
2. David Kilgour and I, in July 2006, released a report on the mass killing of Falun Gong for their organs (https://cja.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/Kilgour-Matas-organ-harvesting-rpt-July6-eng.pdf); Ethan Gutmann released the book “The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem” in 2014 (https://www.globepequot.com/author/ethan-gutmann/)
3. Chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, former lead prosecutor at Slobodan Milošević, former President of Serbia, at the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia between 1998 and 2006, full judgment at (https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ChinaTribunal_JUDGMENT_1stMarch_2020.pdf)
4. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1540/text
5. https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/DidiKirstenTatlow_Submission.pdf
7. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/review/buried-by-the-times-horror-story.html
