WASHINGTON—Lawmakers leading a congressional panel on China are calling for the State Department to set up rewards seeking first-hand evidence to help hold accountable perpetrators of Beijing’s forced organ harvesting.
Chairs of the bicameral Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), will write to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, requesting for funds to be set aside for disrupting and deterring the lucrative, and state-sponsored abuse, according to a letter The Epoch Times viewed before its release.
Under the War Crimes Rewards Program, the State Department rewards up to $5 million to individuals with insights that result in the arrest, transfer, or conviction of foreign nationals accused of crimes against humanity, genocide, or war crimes.
Other State Department programs include Rewards for Justice, which seeks information that “protects American lives and furthers U.S. national security objectives,” and Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program, which covers transnational crimes such as human trafficking.
Mr. Smith suggests that a reward program on forced organ harvesting would be a good part of the State Department’s initiative to counter crimes against humanity and human trafficking.
“Whistleblowers, and men and women who become truth tellers against dictatorships are absolutely worth their weight in gold,” he told The Epoch Times. “Because then we get the inside story about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it. We’ll do it with anonymity to protect them.”
The layer of protection is “absolutely important” especially if the whistleblowers are part of the Chinese diaspora with families and friends back within Chinese borders.
“If they want to come and testify, I would welcome them any day of the week”—but only if doing so doesn’t trigger a retaliatory mechanism under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he said.
“They’ll kill their parents, they’ll kill their sister—that’s how they do it—or put them in jail and torture.”
China’s organ transplant industry generates about $1 billion annually by some estimates. London-based independent China Tribunal, led by British barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice who worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, investigated the issue for a year and concluded in 2019 that the forced organ harvesting in China has happened “on a significant scale” and that the act constitutes a crime against humanity. The main victims, according to the tribunal findings, are adherents of Falun Gong, a meditative practice with tens of millions of followers subject to the Chinese regime’s elimination campaign since 1999.
Reports of forced organ harvesting targeting detained Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, and other ethnic and religious minorities in China has alarmed United Nations human rights experts, who in 2021 described the allegations they received as “trafficking with a medical nature” involving surgeons and other health professionals. The following May, the European Parliament adopted a resolution condemning the abuse.
The Parliament members “consider that the practice of organ harvesting from living prisoners on death row and prisoners of conscience in China may amount to crimes against humanity,” according to a statement the body issued.
Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Calif.), who attended a commission hearing on the topic on March 20, said that Congress “must use every tool to find evidence of organ harvesting and prevent it from happening.”
“It is vital that we expose and end the CCP’s forced organ harvesting scheme,” she told The Epoch Times. “The CCP has created a sophisticated industry by preying on the most vulnerable populations in China. Human rights experts estimate that 60,000 to 100,000 forced organ transplants are occurring annually in China. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
The California lawmaker, together with Rep. Neal Dunn (R-Fla.), in June 2023 wrote to Mr. Blinken asking for actions to prevent Chinese health professionals implicated in the abuse from gaining U.S. immigration status.
It’s “very, very important that the whole world knows exactly what CCP has been doing to these minority communities,” she said at the hearing.
These are “innocent people’s organs,” she said. “We really have to stop it.”
Mr. Smith at the hearing invited his colleagues to join him in signing the letter.
“Silence is unacceptable,” he said. “Silence is not an option, particularly from medical associations and corporations. They remain silent, they are the most at risk of complicity in this heinous crime against humanity.”
He added that “we all bear some responsibility to act.”
“This is an ongoing fight to demand transparency and justice,” he said. “If we don’t act now, many more lives will be lost.”
From The Epoch Times
