Debate Flares Over China’s Inclusion at Vatican Organ Trafficking Meeting
In a letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome, where the two-day Summit on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism began on Tuesday, 11 ethicists wrote: "Our concern is with the harvesting and trafficking of organs from executed prisoners in China." China has admitted
that it extracted organs from death row prisoners for decades, in what critics have called a serious violation of the rights of inmates who cannot give genuine consent.
Wendy Rogers wrote that We urge the summit to consider the plight of incarcerated prisoners in China who are treated as expendable human organ banks,
The Chinese official attending the meeting, Dr. Huang Jiefu, a liver transplant specialist, is co-chairman of the National Organ Donation
and Transplantation Committee of China, which is charged with remaking the country’s organ donation system to ensure transparency in sourcing and distributing organs in line with international standards.
"The weight of evidence is such that it’s up to the Chinese to prove
that they’re not doing this, and not the other way round." Last year, 4,080 Chinese donated a total of 11,296 organs, according to an article published on Monday in the Chinese journal Health News and republished in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main newspaper.
Organizers of the Vatican meeting said they hoped it would help generate remedies to the problem of organ trafficking
and transplant tourism, which they called a "form of human slavery" afflicting many parts of the world.
An article co-written by another member of the national committee, Dr. Zheng Shusen, also a liver transplant specialist, was recently withdrawn after
publication by the journal Liver International over concerns it relied on data from executed prisoners, Science magazine reported on Monday.