WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — In an overwhelming vote of 413-2, the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday passed bill HR 1154, authored by Republican Rep. Chris Smith, co-chair of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, to enact measures opposing the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) appalling industry of harvesting organs from young people while still alive and killing them horrifically in the process.
Targeted groups include Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs and other Central Asians detained by the Communist regime in concentration camps. Smith’s bill must now pass the Senate and go through the White House to become law.
On the House floor, Smith testified that “Every year, under General Secretary Xi Jinping and his Chinese Communist Party, between 60,000 to 100,000 young victims — average age 28 — are murdered in cold blood to steal their internal organs.”
“These crimes against humanity are unimaginable,” Smith declared. “Ethnic groups targeted for mass harvesting include Uyghurs — who suffer from Xi Jinping’s ongoing genocide — and the Falun Gong, whose peaceful meditation and exercise practices — and exceptional good health — make their organs highly desirable. The Chinese Communist Party has declared them to be an ‘evil cult’ — fit for butchering.”
Last year, Smith led a chilling hearing exposing the CCP’s forced organ harvesting of prisoners while still alive. At the hearing, a Chinese doctor testified how under police orders he had performed one such surgery on a victim of a failed execution and discovered in mid-operation, as he began cutting, that the victim was in a state of shock, not dead, and that he was performing a vivisection on a living man.
Smith also detailed on Monday that it is publicly known “through open-source Chinese language media that elderly high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials have received replacement organs from the very people they despise and oppress at the People’s Liberation Army Hospital 301 in Beijing.”
The Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China, also called the China Tribunal and chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, conducted the world’s first independent legal investigation and analysis into the matter.
The Tribunal’s unanimous judgment, published in 2020, concluded that beyond any reasonable doubt,“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,” and that while China “has changed its rhetoric about the sources of organs for transplantation, the Tribunal found that its claims are unbelievable and that official statistics have been falsified.”
The 2020 report stated, among other facts, that “In regard to the Uyghurs, the Tribunal had evidence of medical testing on a scale that could allow them, amongst other uses, to become an ‘organ bank.’”
In light of the findings, the Tribunal declared that the in China “Commission of Crimes Against Humanity against the Falun Gong and Uyghurs has been proved beyond reasonable doubt,” and that “Governments and any who interact in any substantial way with the PRC [People’s Republic of China] … should now recognize that they are, to the extent revealed above, interacting with a criminal state.”
Nice likewise testified that “The Falun Gong and the Uyghurs in the PRC each qualify as a ‘group’ for purposes of the crime of Genocide.”
Smith also referenced the testimony of Ethan Gutmann, senior research fellow in China Studies Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who said that a 2016 Kilgour-Matas-Gutmann report “estimated China’s total transplant volume as 60,000 to 100,000 annually.” Gutmann stated that “at any given time since 2017, there are approximately a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Hui in the camps,” and that his “estimate is that 25,000 to 50,000 camp detainees are being harvested every year.”
“28- year-olds from the Xinjiang camps can be … harvested for two or three organs, translating into a minimum of 50,000 organs or a maximum of 150,000 organs,” Gutmann recounted.
WATCH: Uncovering the grotesque live organ harvesting practices in China
In corroborating evidence, Dr. Jacob Lavee and Matthew Robertson published in a top peer-reviewed U.S. medical journal their findings from Chinese medical journal articles, among which, “71 papers 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.”
Smith denounced the horrific practice, saying, “While this still shocks me, I cannot say it surprises me.”
According Smith’s summary of the bill, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023 (HR 1154):
“Amends the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to require reports on forced organ harvesting and trafficking in persons for purposes of the removal of organs in foreign countries, including and especially in China.”
It also imposes “serious sanctions on any person the President determines funds, sponsors or otherwise facilitates forced organ harvesting or trafficking in persons for purposes of the removal of organs,” with “civil penalties” including “a fine of up to $250,000” and “criminal penalties” including “a fine of up to $1 million and imprisonment for not more than 20 years, or both.” Sanctions will also include “blocking and prohibiting all transactions in property and interests in property and making such persons inadmissible to the United States and ineligible to receive a visa.”
“State-sponsored forced organ harvesting is big business for Xi and the Chinese Communist Party and shows absolutely no signs of abating,” Smith concluded Monday. “We must act — decisively.”
The China Tribunal published its full judgment on the CCP’s organ harvesting from the living in 2020 with a summary judgment and a powerful documentary.
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