MONTREAL (LifeSiteNews) – The head of a nursing program in British Columbia has denounced the forced organ harvesting the Chinese government carries out on its own citizens as part of a gruesome industry in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) targets healthy youth and political prisoners. 

Tony Chacon, head of the Nephrology Nursing Specialty Program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), became alerted to the issue when some BCIT patients suspiciously received an organ transplant within a short span of time after traveling to China, in contrast to a much longer wait time in western countries. 

In July 4 remarks at the 2023 Congress of the International Nurses Council (INC) in Montreal — a convention for professional nurses hosted by the INC and the Canadian Nurses Association — Chacon said of patients of the BCIT transplant program who travel abroad for organ transplants, “We have an obligation [to] look after them when they come back. They are followed by the transplant program, but we sometimes find out through them or family that they have actually bought the transplant in China.” 

Referring to China’s known practice of forced organ harvesting for transplants, Chacon affirmed, “It’s a hard topic, but I do think it’s important to raise awareness and recognize. And I just think we need to do a better job on that. I think it’s a moral obligation. I have friends that were formally citizens of the People’s Republic of China, and they actually told me that … ‘I didn’t want to talk about it too much,’ because they’re afraid of persecution.” 

In a 2022 summit conducted by Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) — an international group of doctors and medical professionals whose aim is to end China’s gruesome and inhumane practice — Chinese organ harvesting was traced back to 1984, when the CCP passed a law allowing the practice, which began with harvesting organs from political prisoners. The practice was first made known to the U.S. Congress in 2001 in testimony offered by Dr. Wang Guoqi, who served at the General Hospital of Armed Police of Tianjin, China. 

A 2006 report titled “Bloody Harvest,” published by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, confirmed that the CCP has targeted Buddhist Falun Gong adherents as the primary victims of the government-run organ harvesting program.  

Deborah Collins-Perrica, director of nursing affairs for Nurses Against Forced Organ Harvesting, which is part of DAFOH, said at the INC Congress, “We want 30 million nurses in the world to know that we’re advocating for medical ethics and nursing ethics and human rights.” 

“Our message includes, too, though, that organ harvesting from living people may occur in some regions of the world, but it is only in the People’s Republic of China that it is state-sanctioned and under military control. The primary victims being prisoners of conscience of different religions, ethnicities, and cultural beliefs in China,” she said. 

Last year, Republican U.S. Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, co-chair of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, led a chilling hearing exposing the latest evidence of 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. 

In March, in an overwhelming vote of 413-2, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 1154, authored by Smith, to enact measures opposing the CCP’s appalling industry of harvesting organs from young people while still alive and killing them horrifically in the process. The bill has been received and read in the Senate and has been referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations. 

RELATED: US House passes bill to sanction Chinese Communists’ ghoulish industry of live organ harvesting  

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.” 

The Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China, also called the China Tribunal, 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.” 

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.’” 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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