When a senior Chinese health official said last year that China would stop using prisoners’ organs for transplants as of Jan. 1 this year, human rights advocates and medical professionals around the world greeted the announcement with relief.
It seemed to end a decades-long form of human exploitation in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of organs of executed prisoners were harvested each year.
However, organs from prisoners, including those on death row, can still be used for transplants in China, with the full backing of policymakers, according to Chinese news reports, as well as doctors and medical researchers in China and abroad.
“They just reclassified prisoners as citizens,” said Li Huige, a Chinese-born doctor at the University of Mainz in Germany.
The announcement in December last year by Huang Jiefu (黃潔夫), a former Chinese deputy minister of health and chairman of the National Health and Family Planning Commission’s Human Organ and Transplant Committee, was “an administrative trick,” said Otmar Kloiber, the secretary-general of the World Medical Association.
The association opposes the use of organs from prisoners in any country that has the death penalty, saying there is no way of knowing if such donations are truly voluntary.
The relabeling of prisoners has enabled Chinese officials to include them in a new, nationwide “citizen donation” system that China is building to reduce its long-standing reliance on organs from prisoners. The move has been described in multiple state reports quoting Huang and other officials.
In January, the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily reported that voluntary donations from citizens had become the sole source of organs for transplant.
It then quoted Huang as saying: “Death-row prisoners are also citizens, and the law does not deprive them of their right to donate their organs. If death-row prisoners are willing to donate their organs to atone for their crimes, then they should be encouraged.”
The December last year announcement came at a meeting of the newly established China Organ Procurement Organization Alliance. It is one of several organizations set up in recent years to help transform China’s system from one depending heavily on organs from executed prisoners to one of voluntary donation.
The alliance, Huang, and National Health and Family Planning Commission officials could not be reached for comment.
At the meeting, Huang announced: “From Jan. 1, 2015, we will completely stop using death-row prisoners’ organs as a transplant source. The only source will be organs from dead citizens who have voluntarily donated.”
The discrepancy between that statement and current practice is coming to light as doctors begin to speak publicly about what they call major changes in their country’s troubled organ donation system.
When Chinese officials said last year that they would no longer use prisoners’ organs, that meant they would no longer systematically harvest organs from death-row inmates, Li said, adding that Huang “is separating dead prisoners’ organs into two groups.”
“One is the traditional style, ‘I don’t care if prisoners agree or not, we’ll use them,’” which has been illegal since 2007, he said.
“When he said, ‘We will completely stop using prisoners’ organs,’ he meant stop using that illegal component,” Li said.
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