Laogai Research Foundation executive director Harry Wu made a visit to the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, to congratulate his friend Congressman Frank Wolf on the release of his new book, Prisoner of Conscience.  Harry met Rep. Wolf across the street from the Heritage Foundation, and the two "prisoners of conscience" walked in together for the press conference on the book release.

Another look into LRF's Archive:

On June 18, 1996, Dr. Qian Xiaojiang testified in front of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, detailing his participation in organ extraction from prisoners in China.  During the 80s, Dr. Qian worked as a physician at the Bangpu Medical Institute in Bangpu, Anhui Province. At the time, organ transplantation was in its infancy in China: the surgery itself was extremely risky, and because of traditional Chinese conceptions of the body, virtually no Chinese willingly donated organs.  Qian found out about the hospital's first successful kidney transplant surgery from his medical school roommate, who happened to be the son of the hospital's director of the Urological Department.

The kidney, of course, belonged to an executed prisoner.

Dr. Qian moved to Shanghai and worked in clinical immunology at the Shanghai No. 2 Medical University, where he studied transplant rejection and organ failure.  Dr. Qian testified that approximately 20 kidney transplant procedures took place every year, and nearly all organs came from executed prisoners. And in China, doctors are not required to test if prisoners are brain-dead before beginning organ extraction: in one case in the spring of 1987, doctors "could feel tremblings and pulses in [the prisoner's] limbs.  Everything from that prisoner, kidneys, spleen, heart, and corneas were extracted. [A colleague, Dr. Shao Ming] used the word, 'Empty.'"

Dr. Qian concluded that in China, kidney transplant surgeries using prisoners' organs are an "open secret." "In China," he said, "whenever a patient needs a kidney, the first reaction, no matter whether it is the surgeon, the nurse, or the patient himself, is: 'wait for the guy to be shot.'"

Dr. Qian's full testimony will be available in the LRF digital archive when it launches this fall.

Over the last 18 years, Laogai Research Foundation has amassed an immense amount of historical and present day documents, photographs, video, and other artifacts related to Chinese human rights issues, with a particular emphasis on the Laogai. In order to preserve these resources and make them available to the public, LRF is building a digital archive to house our collection. While a limited amount of material will be made available in the fall of this year (and the online collection will grow as our resources permit), we wanted to give you a sneak peak at one item that will be available: video from a BBC investigation into the profitable harvesting of Chinese prisoners' organs for sale.

In a BBC broadcast from November 15, 1994 a news team traveled to China to investigate claims that prisoners who were executed in China were then harvested for their organs  for transplants to both Chinese and foreigners. In China, sentencing prisoners to death is often publicly televised (though this is less so today given international criticism) and quite often the crimes that people could be put to death for were ones that one wouldn’t normally think would be severe enough to warrant execution (i.e. robbery). According to reports, criminals under the age of 25 were those most “sought after” for organs, since they would likely be the most healthy. Chinese officials were reported as saying that the harvesting of prisoner organs allowed condemned men to repay a “debt” to society since they would be used for a “greater purpose.”

Live in or around Berkeley, CA?  Harry Wu will be in town to keynote the Organs Watch working group meeting on Thursday, May 6.  For details, see the flyers below.

The Swiss pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche received a dubious honor today, making the short list for the Public Eye Award 2010, an award that is handed out each year to the multinational corporation with the worst ethics. The award is cosponsored by the Berne Declaration and Greenpeace, and will be announced in late January, just before the opening of this year's World Economic Forum in Davos. Despite tough competition, La Roche seems set to "win" in the category of inhumane global business practices.

According to data reviewed by Public Eye Award sponsors, Hoffman-La Roche conducted clinical trials last year on a new drug, Cellept, that suppresses the immune system of recipients of organ transplants in order to lower the risks of organ rejection. To be sure, this has the potential to be a life-saving drug. The problem is these test were conducted on 300 organ transplant recipients inside China. Since even the Chinese government admits that the vast majority of organs for transplants in China come from executed prisoners, to conduct a clinical trial on organ transplants of this scale inside China is morally reprehensible. You can learn more about the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners in China here.The clinical trial could have easily been conducted in Europe, the US, or some other region with a better-regulated organ donation system, but it appears that Hoffman-La Roche chose instead to compromise their integrity in order to save money. This certainly justifies their status on the shortlist for the Public Eye Award 2010, and may very well be enough for Hoffmann-La Roche to take home the prize.

Click here to read the original German article announcing this news.

In a joint report issued Tuesday the United Nations and the Council of Europe declared a new international pact is needed to ban trafficking in human organs, tissues and cells, with the object of protecting victims and punishing offenders.

This announcement came almost 6 weeks after Chinese Minister of Health Huang Jiefu announced the launch of an organ donation system to, “eliminate illegal organ trading and encourage people to become donors.”

According to the United Nations’ World Health Organization, 90 percent of the organs transplanted in China each year come from executed prisoners, and the process of organ extraction from executed prisoners has become even easier in recent years with the utilization of lethal injections and mobile execution vans.