A Twitter post by professional basketball player Enes Kanter highlights the concerning practice of the Chinese government’s forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience and other detainees.
Kanter’s tweet, posted on Tuesday, Nov. 16, reads:
“The Chinese Government engages in forced organ harvesting.
Ethnic & religious groups,
Tibetans,Uyghurs in death camps, Christians,Falun Gong are all targeted”
“Stop murdering for organs.
It’s a crime against humanity
End forced organ harvesting in China,
NOW!”
According to the China Tribunal, a UK-based independent court set up to investigate the practice of forced organ harvesting in China, has concluded that around 1.5 million jailed people have been targeted and killed for their organs, mostly over the last two decades.
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The findings highlight a disturbing transplant trade worth an estimated $1 billion per year. The authoritarian regime maintains that the harvested organs are not from jailed prisoners of conscience but rather from volunteer “donated organs.”
READ MORE:
Is NBA Player Enes Kanter Being Punished for Criticizing Communist China?
“Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale,” the tribunal concluded in June of this year. The practice is “of unmatched wickedness — on a death for death basis — with the killings by mass crimes committed in the last century,” it added.
In addition, on Nov. 4, officials published on a Chinese website the sale of human organs, listing the breakdown of fees and prices for the availability of said organs.
The website also included a chart with a detailed breakdown for the cost of each organ, inadvertently shedding light on the disturbing reality that human organs can be easily attained and purchased in China.
In a statement released by the China Tribunal and reported on NBC news, the tribunal said many of those affected were Falun Gong practitioners, a meditation discipline practiced by an estimated 70 to 100 million people in China at the time. The practice was banned in 1999 and followed a brutal persecution of its followers.
The tribunal added that it was also possible that Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang — an ethnic minority group who are currently being detained in vast numbers across concentration camps in western China — were also being targeted and killed for their organs.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday was not immediately available to comment on the tribunal’s findings. The CCP has also not provided any comment on the issue.
