Question 40739 — foreign policy

Summary

Ms. Frédérique Dumas draws the attention of the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs to the issue of forced organ harvesting practiced in the People's Republic of China. In 2018, the Minister responded to several written questions on this subject. Among the many answers he provided was this: "China made organ trafficking illegal in 2007 and officially ended organ harvesting from of prisoners executed in 2015. The reform has enabled positive progress. Today, the transplantation system is based on organ donations. The challenge for China now remains the full implementation of the law.” However, although China is a party to the Palermo Convention, numerous evidence has been provided of organ harvesting practices whose origin is not specified and for which no proof consent is provided. We are also witnessing the institutionalization of such practices against prisoners of conscience, Uighur and Kazakh Muslim minorities, Tibetans, Christians and even Falun Gong practitioners. In 2019, specialists Matthew P. Robertson, Raymond L. Hinde and Jacob Lavee published an article in the journal BMC Medical Ethics which concluded that "the only plausible explanation that it is possible to give to the elements studied by the authors is that official organ transplant data is falsified and systematically manipulated by China. Some apparently involuntary donors also appear to be misclassified as voluntary.” Also in 2019, the China Tribunal, an independent tribunal set up in London, analyzed all the existing evidence on this subject. He determined in its judgment “unanimously and beyond all reasonable doubt, that in China, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for some time on a very large number of victims”. In January 2020, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted Resolution 2327, proposed in 2016, on organ transplant tourism. In this resolution, the Assembly recommends “that States parties exercise great caution regarding cooperation with the China Organ Transplant Response System and the Chinese Red Cross, in light of a recent study that casts doubt on the credibility of the reform of China's organ transplant system. On June 14, 2021, UN experts said they were “extremely alarmed” by reports report of “alleged organ harvesting” targeting minorities in detention in China. These experts stated that the information received was credible and described that detainees belonging to ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities could be forcibly subjected to blood tests and organ examinations such as ultrasounds and x-rays, without their informed consent and that the results of the examinations would be registered in a living organ source database that facilitates organ allocation. The experts also said that despite the gradual development of China's organ donation system, "reports continued to emerge of serious human rights violations in obtaining organs for transplantation in China." The list of evidence is therefore endless. In this context, she asks him to do of the fight against the practices of forced organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China an absolute priority. She asks him in this regard whether France, beyond the already existing mechanisms and the upcoming ratification of the Council of Europe Convention against trafficking in human organs, will put in place concrete actions in order to concretely fight against this scourge. So that the main principles of the Convention of Compostela are not just words and are translated into reality, she asks him if France will lift the reservations it made when signing the Compostela Convention and which partly empty the latter of its substance. She asks him to please respond to all of these points.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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