Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said lawmakers heard testimony detailing the allegations that prisoners of conscience and religious minorities in China are being systematically targeted for forced organ harvesting, as he urged the Senate to advance legislation aimed at combating the practice.
At a May 14 hearing held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Smith and co-chair of the commission, described forced organ harvesting as “one of the most barbaric human rights atrocities of our time.”
Witnesses at the hearing alleged that members of persecuted groups in China — including Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, Christians, Tibetans, and other detainees — have been subjected to medical testing and organ procurement without consent.
Smith used the hearing to renew calls for Senate passage of the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act, a bill approved overwhelmingly by the House earlier this year that would impose sanctions on individuals involved in the practice.
“Delay is denial,” Smith said. “Every day without consequences is another day perpetrators operate in the shadows.”
Among those testifying was Ethan Gutmann, a senior research fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who cited research estimating that tens of thousands of organ transplants could be linked annually to detainees held in China’s prison and internment systems.
“If we use one million detainees as the baseline population across camps, prisons, forced-labor facilities, and other carceral environments, that means 25,000 to 50,000 Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic detainees harvested per year,” Gutmann told lawmakers.
Former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback told lawmakers that “disfavored religious communities are particularly targeted by the perpetrators of the forced organ harvesting scheme.”
Jan Jekielek, senior editor of The Epoch Times, described what he called an “industrialized forced organ harvesting” system enabled by “totalitarian control, mass dehumanization, and the willingness to turn human beings into spare parts for profit, power and elite longevity.”
The hearing also included testimony from former detainees and camp workers who described blood testing, medical procedures, and prisoners disappearing after being taken for surgery inside detention facilities.
“Every Monday, no classes were held for the detainees. Instead, blood was drawn from them,” testified Kalbinur Sidik, who said she worked inside a detention camp in Xinjiang. “Older and stronger prisoners were taken away, while new ones arrived.”
Another witness, Seyed Alireza “Ali” Motevalian, described what he said he observed inside Shanghai Prisons General Hospital, where “prisoners were restrained or incapacitated, thumb-printed, taken to surgery, and did not return.”