My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group, and I shall speak specifically and briefly to Amendments 162 and 173.
These amendments are updates to the Human Tissue Act, which was born out of public outrage following the Alder Hey scandal, when over 100,000 organs, body parts and entire bodies of foetuses and stillborn babies were stored in NHS facilities. The body parts of dead patients, including children, were removed without consent. Today, the Human Tissue Authority’s guiding principles, as set out in its code of practice, are consent, dignity, quality, honesty and openness. These principles should not only reflect how human tissue sourced from within our own nation is treated, we must treat human tissue and organs with the same principles when sourced overseas.
In China, as has been said, there is substantial evidence of Falun Gong practitioners and Uighurs—as well as some evidence of Tibetans and house Christians—being killed on demand for their organs. Blood is taken off them for tissue-typing at the time when they were taken into custody, often with no idea why they were taken into custody at all, other than that they belong to one of those groups. There is no consent, no dignity and no transparency.
On 7 December last year, the British Medical Association released a statement on the abuse of Uighurs in China, expressing
“grave concern regarding the situation in China and the continuing abuse of the Uyghur population of the country as well as other minorities.”
It went on to state:
“We are particularly alarmed by the reports of organ harvesting, forced birth prevention, and the use of genomics data for racial profiling.”
It urged
“the UK government and international actors to exert pressure on the Chinese government to cease its inhumane actions towards the Uyghurs”.
If we do not pass amendments as laid before the House today, we will be complicit with these practices, because we will be looking at them with Nelson’s eye, with all the evidence that we have that they are going on.
On Amendment 173, on the exhibition of whole bodies using a plastinated technique, I suggest that there is no transparency whatever. Any attempt to claim that there has been consent is extremely suspect, because consent is very easily falsified. I went to one of these exhibitions because I thought you ought to go
and see what you are criticising. This was not an anatomical, educational experience but a visual display of plastinated bodies in all kinds of different poses. But the one that horrified me the most was a pregnant woman, quite advanced in her pregnancy and with the foetus in her womb, which had been plastinated. I do not believe that that woman would have given consent for plastination. That raised real questions as to why such an advanced foetus was in the womb of a dead woman without something there explaining the nature of her death, the cause of death and the circumstances in which she had decided to consent to such a procedure.