My Lords, in a sense, this amendment is very different from my first two. None the less, we are seeking here to use procurement legislation to advance government policy in relation to the awful practice of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China. The practice was found by the China Tribunal—as advised by Edward Fitzgerald KC, who provided expert legal opinion to it—to be a crime against humanity and part of a possible genocide against Falun Gong.
Forced organ harvesting in China involves the removal of organs from a living prisoner of conscience for the purpose of transportation, killing the victim in the process. It is state sanctioned and widespread throughout China, with the Chinese Communist Party targeting individuals because of their religious and spiritual beliefs or ethnicity. The victims are known primarily to be Falun Gong practitioners, but more recent evidence indicates that Uighur Muslims are also targeted on a massive scale. Further to that, there are several lines of evidence showing that Tibetan and house Christians are likely victims of forced organ harvesting.
Regarding Uighurs and other minorities, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published its report on Xinjiang in August, stating:
“Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.”
It also stated that the treatment of Uighurs and others in Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party
“may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
That is a most important and profound statement, made only three months ago.
Both Uighur and Falun Gong practitioners are arbitrarily arrested, detained in camps and tortured. They face sexual violence, disappear while in detention and are murdered for their organs, on a vast scale. A study published in April this year in the American Journal
of Transplantation investigated whether Chinese transplant surgeons established first that the prisoners are dead, before procuring their hearts and lungs, or whether the cause of death was the organ procurement itself. The study was based on the dead donor rule—the most fundamental ethical rule in organ transplantation. It states that organ procurement must not commence until the donor is formally pronounced dead; the procurement of organs must not cause the donor’s death.
The paper, entitled Execution by Organ Procurement: Breaching the Dead Donor Rule in China, was written by Matthew Robertson and Dr Jacob Lavee. Dr Lavee is a transplant surgeon and the founder and a former director of the heart surgery unit at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel. In 2005, a patient told him that his insurance company had scheduled a heart transplant operation for him that would take place in two weeks. The patient flew to China and received the heart as arranged. That would be impossible unless the time of death of the donor was known in advance. Following this incident, Dr Lavee spearheaded the organ transplantation law in Israel, the first of its kind in the world, which prevented insurance companies from reimbursing expenses associated with illicitly obtained organs. Along with a range of reforms encouraging domestic donation, this stopped the China-to-Israel organ-trafficking pipeline in its tracks.
During this recent research, Robertson and Lavee found, in 71 different Chinese medical studies published between 1980 and 2015, sourced from 56 hospitals in 33 cities, that brain death could not properly have been declared. Therefore, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the cause of the donor’s death. The authors state in a recent article in the Tablet,
“the act of execution was joined with the act of heart removal, and was carried out by surgeons on the operating table.”
Just think of that.
My amendment is designed to exclude suppliers located in a country at high risk of forced organ harvesting from being awarded a public contract involving any device or equipment intended for use in organ transplant medicine or activities relating to human tissue or any service or goods relating to organ transplant medicine or activities involving human tissue. Essentially, it would prevent any service or goods that may have been involved in or developed off the back of the forced organ harvesting trade from entering the UK. This includes organ transplant training, such as the training of Chinese organ transplant services, related education and research, as well as organ transplantation equipment.
I have been very encouraged by the Government’s recent willingness to legislate on this issue, such as through my amendment to the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill last year, which included consent provisions for imported human tissue for use in medicines; and the amendments to the Health and Care Bill in April this year, prohibiting the commercialisation of organ tourism. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, have been huge supporters of this approach and I am glad to see them here today.
These legislative steps have set a good precedent, both in our country and as a signal globally. I emphasise to the Minister that passing amendments such as this into British law is significant internationally. Other countries observe what is happening, and we are part of a global movement to try to get action to stop this reprehensible behaviour.
I am grateful to the Government for their sympathy for our approach, but I want to go further. In April this year, it was stated in a ground-breaking business and human rights legal advisory, written by international law firm Global Rights Compliance, entitled Do No Harm: Mitigating Human Rights Risks when Interacting with International Medical Institutions & Professionals in Transplantation Medicine, that
“medical professionals and institutions who have collaborations with Chinese medical institutions involved in forced organ harvesting face a risk of being charged with complicity in international crimes, including crimes against humanity.”
It goes on to explain that
“aiding and abetting ‘consists of practical assistance, encouragement, or moral support which has a substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime’.”
Prestigious medical institutions, such as the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, are now taking action. In April this year, the society issued a policy that it would no longer accept submissions to its journal or for presentations at its conference related to transplantation and involving either organs or tissue from human donors in the People’s Republic of China. My forced organ harvesting amendment to the Procurement Bill is critical to protect our UK medical professionals and institutions from complicity. I beg to move.