Myth: Most organs are sourced from convicted death-row prisoners

The number of death-row prisoners do not support the large volume of organ transplants

The Chinese regime treats its number of executions as a state secret. International organizations have attempted to estimate this number over the years using various sources.

Among them, Amnesty International counted death-row executions published in media reports and official databases: there were 8,401 between 1995 and 1999 (giving an annual average of 1,680), followed by an average of 1,616 annually between 2000 and 2005.¹ Between 2006 and 2008, the average was 1,066.^{2 3 4} Since January 2007, when the law was changed to require that all death penalty cases be reviewed by the Supreme People’s Court of China, the number of executions has decreased further. For example, in 2007, 15% of death penalty cases were dismissed by the review.⁵

Amnesty stopped providing such estimates after 2008. Its 2017 report stated, “hundreds of documented death penalty cases are missing from a national online court database,” which “contains only a tiny fraction of the thousands of death sentences that Amnesty International estimates are handed out every year in China.”⁶

The international community generally believes that the number of death-row executions in China has decreased since 2000, when it was around 10,000 per year.^{7 8 9}

A wide variety of sources indicate that death-row executions in China have decreased over the last two decades. Meanwhile, the number of organ transplants in China grew rapidly starting in 2000. This divergence widened in 2007, when transplants continued to grow while death penalty numbers fell further due to new judicial review procedures. Given that the number of voluntary donors remained low and flat, this trend leaves a large gap of transplants not accounted for by the official organ sources.

Furthermore, the government promised to stop using organs from death-row prisoners beginning in 2015.¹⁰

At the same time, China’s transplant numbers increased dramatically, He Xiaoshun, a member of the Expert Committee of the Human Organ Donation Commission, stated in March 2010, “The year 2000 was a watershed for the organ transplant industry in China…the number of liver transplants in 2000 reached 10 times that of 1999; in 2005, the number tripled further [since 2000].”¹¹

The decline in the number of death-row prisoners stands at variance with the increase in organ transplants in China since 2000.

In 2013, the director of hepatobiliary surgery at Peking University People’s Hospital said, “Our hospital conducted 4,000 liver and kidney transplant operations within a particular year, and all of the organs are from death-row prisoners.”¹²

Considering that many convicted death-row prisoners are not suitable candidates for organ sourcing due to health reasons, it is unlikely that there were sufficient death-row prisoners to serve as this hospital’s true organ source for its 4,000 transplants.

While Chinese officials claim that the country performs about 10,000 transplants a year, based on government-imposed minimum capacity requirements, the 169 approved transplant hospitals could have conducted 60,000 to 100,000 transplants per year.¹³

It is obvious that death-row prisoners, whatever the exact number may be, could account for only a small fraction of the total number of transplants performed in China.

Continued reliance on prisoners’ organs for transplants, including death row executions

The Chinese government has changed its public position on organ sourcing from time to time, claiming that the vast majority of organs came from death-row prisoners, and later, voluntary donations.

In July 2005, after years of denial, former Deputy Minister of Health Huang Jiefu acknowledged for the first time that the majority of transplant organs came from death-row prisoners.¹⁴ After live organ harvesting was exposed in March 2006, Chinese officials returned to the initial denial.^{15 16} Starting in January 2007, Huang has consistently said that organs were sourced from executed prisoners.¹⁷

In August 2013, the National Health and Family Planning Commission issued Notice on Management Regulations for Human Organ Procurement and Distribution (Trial), requiring all approved transplant centers to use the new “Chinese organ distribution and sharing system.” Patients on the waiting list should be entered into this national database, and donated organs should also go through this centralized distribution system.¹⁸

At the China Organ Transplant Conference in November 2013, Huang Jiefu announced the “Hangzhou Resolution,” which promises to discontinue the use of organs from death-row prisoners by June 2014. Among the 169 registered transplant hospitals, 38 signed the resolution.¹⁹

In March 2014, Huang Jiefu explained to Beijing Times that transplant reform “is not about not using organs from death-row prisoners, but not allowing hospitals or medical personnel to engage in private transactions with human organs.”²⁰ “We will regulate the issue by including voluntary organ donations by death-row prisoners in the nation’s public organ donation system.”²¹ “Once entered into our unified allocation system, they are counted as voluntary donations of citizens. The so-called death row organ donation doesn’t exist any longer.”²²

In December 2014, one year after “Chinese organ distribution and sharing system” was announced, Chinese state-owned media declared that China would stop using death-row prisoners’ organs for transplants from January 1, 2015 onwards, and that citizens’ voluntary organ donations after death would be the only source for organ transplants.²³

The Chinese regime has used this system to classify previously unidentified organ sources as voluntary donations.

According to the New York Times article “China Bends Vow, Using Prisoners’ Organs for Transplants,” organs from prisoners, including those on death row, can still be used for transplants in China, and that this use has the backing of policy makers.²⁴

On October 8, 2015, the British Medical Journal published an article titled “China’s semantic trick with prisoner organs”²⁵ co-authored by five medical experts from the United States, Germany and Canada. It stated, “The announcement of December 2014 itself is neither a law nor a governmental regulation.” The article asserts that the Chinese authorities are simply playing word games by “labelling prisoner organs as voluntary donations from citizens.”

Conclusion

Even if China has discontinued the use of organs from death-row prisoners as claimed, its extrajudicial killing of prisoners of conscience for organs lasts at a far larger scale but has never been acknowledged, much less stopped. Unfortunately, the Chinese government’s public relations campaign around death-row prisoners has drawn the world’s attention away from its killing of innocents for their organs—a crime against humanity.

Kilgour, Matas, and Gutmann conclude in their 2016 report that the main source of the massive volume of organs is primarily practitioners of Falun Gong and also Uyghurs, Tibetans, and House Christians.²⁶

References