Human rights experts said that naming and shaming China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would be the best strategy for confronting its horrific practices of harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience.
Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH), a Washington-based nonprofit medical watchdog group, hosted a two-day virtual forum on Dec. 9 and 10 on the anniversaries of the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The event focused on the CCP’s crimes of forced organ harvesting, specifically the state’s targeting of Falun Gong practitioners.
During a panel discussion on the forum’s second day, Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, said it is important to put “unrelenting pressure” on the CCP and “raise the level of horror and shock and outrage at what this criminal CCP is doing to innocent human beings.”
Swett suggested that concerned parties resort to “shaming, blaming, and naming the atrocities committed by offending governments.”
She said that such a strategy would work because the CCP doesn’t want people to know about the crime, aware of the moral revulsion it would provoke.
“We know that the CCP realizes how shameful and repulsive and disgusting to any normal human being their program of forced organ harvesting is, and the reason we know it is they’re lying about it,” Swett said.
What Beijing has falsely claimed, she said, is that it has stopped sourcing organs from executed prisoners and moved to a voluntary donation program, a transition the CCP said began in January 2015.
A 2019 study published in the scientific journal BMC Medical Ethics pointed out that China’s organ donation data, unlike those of 50 other countries, fit unusually well to a quadratic equation. The only explanation for that statistical pattern, the authors said, is data manipulation.
“How do we weaponize China’s own pride and very thin-skinned unwillingness to be shamed on the international stage?” Swett said. “How do we weaponize that to make this a crisis for them, and hopefully a crisis internally, as this issue rises in familiarity and awareness and outrage around the world?”
“It’s through shaming them with the reality of their own deeds,” she said.
Naming and shaming would be more effective than pursuing the issue through “dry legal mechanisms” or U.N. mechanisms, Swett said.
The Chinese regime currently sits on the U.N. Human Rights Council despite that it is one of the worst human rights offenders in the world. China experts have previously said that the Chinese regime was reshaping the norms surrounding U.N. scrutiny of countries’ human rights records.
Falun Gong Protection Act
One concrete way to advance such a naming-and-shaming strategy is by helping push the Falun Gong Protection Act into law, according to Jan Jekielek, senior editor with The Epoch Times and host of EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
“Certainly the Chinese Communist Party is working very, very hard to prevent the Falun Gong Protection Act from being passed, because then it will become law that the CCP is doing this, that that is a very powerful message,” Jekielek said during the panel discussion.
Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice and cochair of the International Religious Freedom Summit, and Jan Jekielek, Epoch Times senior editor and host of “American Thought Leaders,” in Washington on Feb. 2, 2023. Wei Wu/The Epoch Times
The legislation, passed unanimously by the House in May, would hold accountable individuals involved in the forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners by imposing targeted sanctions such as visa restrictions, fines up to $1 million, and 20 years in prison.
It would also require the United States to make it a policy to avoid working with China on organ transplantation while the CCP is in power.
The Senate version of the legislation (S.817) is currently before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
In an X post on Nov. 30, DAFOH urged Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), chairman of the committee, to move the legislation forward.
“We believe that the CCP cannot survive if forced organ harvesting is clearly exposed and the U.S. no longer supports this egregious crime against humanity,” DAFOH wrote.
In 2020, the China Tribunal—an independent, London-based people’s tribunal—concluded that the Chinese regime had for years engaged in the forced harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience, and Falun Gong practitioners were identified as the primary victims.
Sir Geoffrey Nice, who chaired the tribunal, addressed its 2020 findings during the panel discussion.
“We applied the strictest test of factual finding—proof beyond reasonable doubt,“ Nice said. ”We found facts; we applied the law; we came to conclusions, and those conclusions were of crimes against humanity and torture.”
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline rooted in the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Introduced to the public in China in 1992, the practice rapidly expanded its reach through word of mouth, reaching about 70 million to 100 million people by official estimates, before the CCP deemed it a threat and started a violent campaign to eradicate the group in China in 1999, in addition to a vilification campaign to justify its actions—some of which spilled into Western media narratives.
The campaigns continue to this day, and many practitioners are imprisoned in detention facilities, labor camps, and brainwashing centers, where forced labor, torture, and deaths have been widely reported.
In the first six months of this year, 76 new deaths of Falun Gong practitioners at the hands of the CCP were documented, according to Minghui.org, a U.S.-based nonprofit that tracks the persecution of Falun Gong in China.
Cornelia Kaminski, federal chairwoman of Aktion Lebensrecht für Alle, said at the panel discussion that defending human rights is especially important to protect the vulnerable against those in power.
“The European Union should start trying to think of their own Falun Gong Protection Act,” Kaminski said.
Eva Fu contributed to this report.
