The southern Chinese city of Shenzhen has banned the trade in human organs and tightened rules on donations and transplants, amid growing concerns of a thriving illegal business in selling body parts, state media and Hong Kong reports said yesterday.
The new regulations follow allegations by human rights groups that foreign patients are receiving organs removed involuntarily from executed Chinese prisoners. Chinese officials have fiercely denied these charges.
Enacted late Friday by the local legislature, the new rules outlaw trading in human organs, with fines of up to 500,000 yuan (US$60,500) for doctors who obtain organs illegally, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported.
They also stipulate that organs be given on a "first-come, first served" basis and put local Red Cross associations in charge of matching donors with recipients, the English-language China Daily reported.
Violators who obtain organs when they are not eligible will be fined up to 10,000 yuan (US$1,200), the China Daily reported.
The rules also allow for non-relatives to provide living organ donations, although minors under 18 are only allowed to donate to family members, it said.
Details of the earlier regulations were not available and government offices were closed yesterday.
The China Daily report said the new rules followed a positive response to a call for cornea donations four years ago.
However, a plan to use driver's licenses to register organ donors was scrapped because of superstitions.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS