Debate Flares Over China’s Inclusion at Vatican Organ Trafficking Meeting<br />In a letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome, where the two-day Summit on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism began on Tuesday, 11 ethicists wrote: "Our concern is with the harvesting and trafficking of organs from executed prisoners in China." China has admitted<br />that it extracted organs from death row prisoners for decades, in what critics have called a serious violation of the rights of inmates who cannot give genuine consent.<br />Wendy Rogers wrote that We urge the summit to consider the plight of incarcerated prisoners in China who are treated as expendable human organ banks,<br />The Chinese official attending the meeting, Dr. Huang Jiefu, a liver transplant specialist, is co-chairman of the National Organ Donation<br />and Transplantation Committee of China, which is charged with remaking the country’s organ donation system to ensure transparency in sourcing and distributing organs in line with international standards.<br />"The weight of evidence is such that it’s up to the Chinese to prove<br />that they’re not doing this, and not the other way round." Last year, 4,080 Chinese donated a total of 11,296 organs, according to an article published on Monday in the Chinese journal Health News and republished in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main newspaper.<br />Organizers of the Vatican meeting said they hoped it would help generate remedies to the problem of organ trafficking<br />and transplant tourism, which they called a "form of human slavery" afflicting many parts of the world.<br />An article co-written by another member of the national committee, Dr. Zheng Shusen, also a liver transplant specialist, was recently withdrawn after<br />publication by the journal Liver International over concerns it relied on data from executed prisoners, Science magazine reported on Monday.
