My Lords, in moving Amendment 91 I will support all the other amendments in this group.
In the Prime Minister’s speech to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet two days ago, he said that China posed a
“systemic challenge to our values and interests … a challenge that grows more acute as it moves towards even greater authoritarianism.”
I want briefly to draw the House’s attention to one aspect of that country’s behaviour in relation to the appalling forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience and to ask the Government to accept my very modest amendment as a small but important measure towards, I hope, ending this practice. This would give a discretionary power to exclude suppliers from being awarded a public contract who have participated in forced organ harvesting or unethical activities relating to human tissue, including where they are involved in providing a service or goods relating to such activities.
Forced organ harvesting in China is the removal of organs from a living prisoner of conscience for the purpose of transplantation, killing the victim in the process. It is state-sanctioned and widespread throughout China, with the Chinese Communist Party targeting individuals because of their religion, spiritual beliefs or ethnicity. The victims are known to be primarily Falun Gong practitioners and Uighur Muslims. There are also several lines of evidence to show that Tibetans and house Christians are likely victims of forced organ harvesting.
With regard to the Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published its report into Xinjiang in August this year, which stated:
“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.”
Both Uighurs and Falun Gong practitioners are arbitrarily arrested, detained in camps, tortured, face sexual violence, disappear while in detention and are murdered on a vast scale for their organs.
The evidence is now explicit. In April this year, a paper by Matthew Robertson and Dr Jacob Lavee was published in the American Journal of Transplantation titled “Execution by Organ Procurement: Breaching the Dead Donor Rule in China”, which was cited in the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China Annual Report 2022. Their paper found that, in 71 different Chinese medical studies published between 1980 and 2015 and sourced to 56 hospitals in 33 cities, brain death could not have properly been declared, and 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 that
“the act of execution was joined with the act of heart removal, and was carried out by surgeons on the operating table.”
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In Committee, the Minister resisted my amendment, although she appreciated the seriousness of the issue that I raised. She said that the Bill is clear that any serious breach of ethical or professional standards applicable to the supplier would meet the discretionary exclusion ground for professional misconduct. But she also argued that while the exclusion ground of professional misconduct is intended precisely to cover all the ethical issues arising in different industries and sectors, the grounds for exclusion cannot and should not list every issue within a particular industry.
I understand the argument about lists in legislation, but sometimes there is a strong reason to list a particular practice. This practice is so appalling that there is a
strong case for listing it. It is a discretionary ground. It is not mandatory. I have made my amendment as mild as possible, to encourage the Government to accept it. If the Minister continues to say that it is not necessary to list organ harvesting, I would point her to Schedule 7, which specifies a number of grounds for discretionary exclusion, including labour market conduct and environmental misconduct. The organ harvesting that I am talking about fits that strength of criteria.
I return to the Prime Minister’s very important speech on Monday night about our relationship with China. It was nuanced, of course, and it recognised some of the economic realities of that relationship, of which the Minister will be well aware. However, he affirmed that the media and parliamentarians must be able to highlight issues in China without sanction, including calling out abuses in Xinjiang and the curtailment of freedom in Hong Kong.
Last year, the House agreed an amendment to the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill to include consent provisions for imported human tissue for use in medicines. Earlier this year, we amended the Health and Care Bill to prohibit the commercialism of organ tourism. They may be small steps, but internationally they were regarded as a visible sign of this country’s concern and as significant. I hope that tonight the House will go one step further. A discretionary power is a modest ask of the Minister. I really hope that we can take one small step towards ending these abhorrent practices. I beg to move.