On Monday last week, an independent tribunal based in London published its final judgement and summary report following an investigation into forced organ harvesting in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The tribunal’s members unanimously concluded that they were “certain” and “sure beyond reasonable doubt” that forced organ harvesting from prisoners — that is the removal of organs from the bodies of previously conscious and healthy inmates without their consent — continues in China “involving a very substantial number of victims.”
The summary report makes for grim reading and is a chilling reminder of the true nature of the communist regime across the Taiwan Strait.
The China Tribunal, chaired by former British judge Geoffrey Nice, was commissioned by non-governmental organization the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China.
Its members, a panel of legal and medical experts, found that Falun Gong practitioners — who engage in the shockingly subversive act of meditation and breathing exercises — have historically probably been the main source of organs. Beijing banned Falun Gong in 1999 after then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) branded the movement’s then-70 million followers as members of an “evil cult,” likely because he saw them as a threat to the primacy of Chinese Communist Party rule. An order was given to arrest and sentence to life in prison anyone found practicing Falun Gong.
The tribunal said that evidence of comprehensive medical testing of Uighurs incarcerated in so-called “re-education camps” in China’s Xinjiang region indicates that organ harvesting might also be occurring there.
Human rights groups say that as many as 1 million Uighurs and others are incarcerated in such camps.
There have been a number of international and non-governmental investigations over the years. However, due to the highly opaque nature of China’s judicial and prison systems, amassing “smoking gun” evidence has been difficult.
As British lawmaker Fiona Bruce put it: “There are no such victims to tell their stories. That is because no one survives. It is almost a perfect crime.”
However, a 2016 investigation by former Canadian secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific region David Kilgour, Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas and investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann concluded that China was operating an “industrial-scale, state-directed organ transplantation system, controlled through national policies and funding.”
The China Tribunal cites evidence of recorded telephone calls by an investigator, which it is satisfied are authentic, to approximately 80 hospitals in China.
Hospitals telephoned offered organs for sale “from people who were alive at the time of the calls and that those organs were available to the callers on short notice.”
The report also notes that organ transplant waiting times in China are “much shorter than usual in the rest of the world and often as little as two weeks.”
The tribunal ends its report with the following words: “It is, again, no pleasure for the Tribunal to be saying it, not least because it may be an observation long overdue from responsible governments ... any who interact in any substantial way with the PRC including: doctors and medical institutions; industry and businesses ... educational establishments ... arts establishments should now recognise that they are, to the extent revealed above, interacting with a criminal state.”
The tribunal’s findings should focus the minds of governments around the world. China should be treated for what it is: a rogue nation and a threat to all liberal democracies.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
In an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said that Taiwan should not have to choose between aligning with Beijing or Washington, and advocated for cooperation with Beijing under the so-called “1992 consensus” as a form of “strategic ambiguity.” However, Cheng has either misunderstood the geopolitical reality and chosen appeasement, or is trying to fool an international audience with her doublespeak; nonetheless, it risks sending the wrong message to Taiwan’s democratic allies and partners. Cheng stressed that “Taiwan does not have to choose,” as while Beijing and Washington compete, Taiwan is strongest when
RSS