Speaker Johnson Calls Out CCP’s Forced Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners, Tibetans

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‘When religious freedom is taken away from people, political freedom soon follows,’ the speaker said.

WASHINGTON—House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) highlighted concerns over the Chinese Communist Party’s forced organ harvesting of faith adherents, naming the regime among “some of the most repressive in the world” for its human rights abuses.

“Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners are placed in forced labor camps and they have their organs harvested by the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Johnson said in a speech at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington on Jan. 31.

The speaker also highlighted Beijing’s “genocidal campaign of forced sterilization, forced detention and reeducation” against Uyghurs in the northwestern Xinjiang region.

A regime like this also has “the least to offer their citizens in terms of economic prosperity and social mobility, and it’s no surprise, because if you’re going to restrict and torment people for their religious beliefs, it’s going to be a tyrannical regime,” he said.

State-sanctioned forced organ harvesting in China—the act of taking organs from unconsenting individuals for sale—first gained the international spotlight in 2006. Whistleblowers spoke out to international investigators and The Epoch Times about the targeting of imprisoned adherents of the persecuted faith group Falun Gong, who were imprisoned in underground facilities expressly designated for that purpose.

Falun Gong is a spiritual practice involving meditative exercises and moral teachings centered on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Its surging popularity in China in the 1990s, with up to 100 million people practicing, was perceived as a threat to the communist regime’s grip on power. In 1999, Beijing launched a sweeping repression campaign vowing to eliminate the practice and its adherents.

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The London-based China Tribunal in 2019 concluded that forced organ harvesting has been taking place in the country on a “significant scale.” Falun Gong practitioners are a primary target group, it found, but other suppressed religious communities, such as Tibetans and Uyghurs, are also victims.

Mr. Johnson, in his speech, highlighted religious freedom as a foundational human right.

“America was founded on the ideal of religious freedom, and a belief that every single person has inalienable rights,” he said.

“When religious freedom is taken away from people, political freedom soon follows,” the speaker said. “We know that that is the lesson of history. James Madison once said it is conscious that is the most sacred of all property. So if governments shouldn’t steal your property, then they shouldn’t steal your conscience.”

‘A Bill Whose Time Has Come’

At the religious freedom summit, several current and former officials on religious affairs called on the United States to step up its efforts to combat the grisly practice.

“Just think about what we’re talking about here—forced organ harvesting. You’re taking somebody’s organs from them and, in all likelihood, killing them. This is completely medieval,” Sam Brownback, who served as the U.S. ambassador-at-large for religious freedom from 2018 to 2021, told The Epoch Times on Jan. 30.

Internationally, backlash has also grown in response to the abuse.

The European Parliament, which in 2022 censured the regime over the practice, in January passed another resolution condemning the persecution of Falun Gong and called for an international investigation into the suppression campaign that has lasted for nearly a quarter of a century.
A dozen human rights experts affiliated with the United Nations have expressed shock and dismay over reports of forced organ harvesting targeting minorities, noting Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims, and Christians held in detention as groups at risk.
In the U.S. House of Representatives, a bill aimed at criminalizing forced organ harvesting passed in March 2023 with a vote of 413-2. And Texas in June adopted a law to ban health insurers from funding organ transplants that use organs from China.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), who led the House anti-forced organ harvesting bill, said he was “very frustrated” to see the bill sitting in the Senate for nearly a year without getting a vote.

“It’s a bill whose time has come,” Mr. Smith told The Epoch Times at the summit on Jan. 30.

China’s state-sanctioned organ harvesting is a billion-dollar industry. The country has even designated hospitals for high-level officials needing organ transplant surgeries.

A former Chinese deputy cultural minister, who died at the age of 87, had “replaced many organs in his body” that he once joked that “many components are not his own anymore,” according to a now-deleted obituary.

“If Xi Jinping tomorrow needs a new liver, he’ll get a Falun Gong practitioner or some others, maybe a Uyghur,” said Mr. Smith, referring to the Chinese communist leader.

“I mean, isn’t that outrageous, the very people he persecutes are becoming the source of organs. This is right out of Nazi Germany.”

A day after the House passage of Mr. Smith’s bill, the Chinese embassy sent an angry email to the congressman’s office claiming that forced organ harvesting was a “farce.”
It was, Mr. Smith recalled, “a big lie in plain sight.”

About a year ago, Mr. Smith was in hospital over some physical ailments.

Lying on the hospital bed, he was struck by the contrast between him and the untold number of prisoners of conscience in China at risk of forced organ harvesting.

“In my case, they’re curing me; in their case, they’re stealing their organs,” he said. “It just hit me with outrage and sorrow at the same time—How dare they do that to another human being?”

The deadly consequence involved is a reason Mr. Smith wants to see this bill through.

“We’re going to get this bill passed, and I mean that. It’s a matter of when and not if,” he said. “I never give up on a bill, and this bill is so important.”

Original News Source Link – Epoch Times

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