You Nexus, huh?
LA Times - Via Houston Chronicle - 17/11/2006
BEIJING — After years of denial, China has acknowledged that many of the human organs used in transplants here are taken from executed prisoners and that many of the recipients are foreigners who pay hefty sums to avoid a long wait.
Speaking at a conference of surgeons in the southern city of Guangzhou, Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu called for a strict code of conduct and better record-keeping to stem China’s thriving illegal organ trade, state media reported.
“Apart from a small portion of traffic victims, most of the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners,” said Huang, reported the English-language China Daily newspaper Thursday. “The current organ donation shortfall can’t meet demand.”
Acknowledgment of what had been an open secret on the Internet, in local magazines and among people waiting for transplanted organs came weeks after China announced tighter oversight of death-penalty cases. Legal experts say requiring the country’s highest court to approve death sentences could reduce them by a third.
While China doesn’t disclose the number of people executed each year, Amnesty International reports that at least 1,770 people were put to death in 2005, based on Chinese media reports. Some activists say it could be as many as 10,000.
Even the lower estimate represents more than 80 percent of the 2,148 executions reported to have taken place worldwide last year. The United States executed 60 prisoners.
In July, China ruled that all sales of organs were illegal. But enforcing such decrees can be a problem here, especially when there are such profits.
In September 2004, local media reported that well-known comedian Fu Biao spent more than $36,000 on a liver taken from an executed prisoner in Shandong Province. And starting in June 2005, reports surfaced on the Internet of retinas and kidneys taken from executed former gang members in Henan province near Beijing.