On Tuesday (March 27), the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass an unprecedented bill that targets organ trafficking worldwide, and specifically names the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as harvesting the organs of murdered prisoners, most of them completely innocent people.
If passed by the Senate and signed into law, H.R. 1154, titled the “Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023,” would be the first action by Congress to combat the atrocity, which has been going on since at least the 1990s but exploded across China starting with the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999.
“This is a crime against humanity, and it’s a war crime, because this is a war on innocent people in China,” New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican who is the bill’s principal sponsor, told The Epoch Times prior to the vote. “Those who willingly engage in this will be held responsible.”
Smith notes that the Act has “got real teeth,” as it calls for penalties of up to $1 million in fines and 20 years in prison for those complicit in the organ trafficking trade.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline that gained great popularity in China during the 1990s, with an estimated 100 million people practicing its slow-moving qigong exercises and reading the moral teachings of founder Li Hongzhi. Under then-leader Jiang Zemin, the CCP launched a nationwide campaign to suppress Falun Gong as a supposed threat to the Party’s power and communist ideology.
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Adherents of Falun Gong became the main victims of mass murder by forced organ harvesting, as revealed by years of investigations. The practice has since spread to other persecuted groups, including Uyghur Muslims and even potentially ordinary Chinese youth.
While China claims that its massive organ transplant industry is fueled by donations, the statistics it provides were shown to be “systematically manipulated and falsified,” according to a 2019 study.
The “Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act” passed by a vote of 413 to 2, with both of the dissenters being Republicans. The bill would sanction anyone involved in forced organ harvesting, as well as mandate annual federal government reports on illicit organ harvesting taking place in other countries.
