H.R. 1154, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, passed unanimously through the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 28 and is now headed to the House floor for a vote. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), would require sanctions on perpetrators and block their financial transactions on U.S. soil. It would also require the U.S. Secretary of State to report to Congress on organ transplant abuses committed in foreign countries.
Forced organ harvesting is a lucrative trade in China, systematically carried out under state order. Doctors remove key organs from the victim, primarily prisoners of conscience, killing them in the process. Investigations from the London-based China Tribunal in 2019 found that the state-sponsored abuse “has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale,” with detained Falun Gong practitioners being the main organ supply.
At the committee hearing, Smith cited the Chinese regime’s persecution of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that espouses the values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance and involves a set of slow-moving exercises. When the regime directed an expansive suppression campaign in 1999 to eradicate the faith, it had an estimated following of up to 100 million. Smith noted that high-ranking CCP officials are entitled to organ replacement transplants, and recalled presiding over a congressional hearing about 25 years ago where a Chinese security official testified that he and other security agents were shooting prisoners, with doctors standing ready to harvest their organs.
Global Financial Integrity (GFI) estimates that the trafficking of organs as a global criminal enterprise generates anywhere between $840 million and $1.7 billion, although such a number could still represent the tip of the iceberg, experts say. Inside China’s opaque organ transplant industry, there’s no telling how many people get killed each year. An investigative report in 2016, which analyzed data such as bed counts, revenue, and transplant capacity across 169 Chinese hospitals, said that those facilities together could have conducted between 60,000 to 100,000 transplants each year.
Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), a co-sponsor on the bill, expressed appreciation to Smith for bringing this “long overdue bill” to the attention of the American public. He noted that the CCP “has complete disregard for human life and human rights” and said he “can’t think of anything more horrific or more barbaric than this practice that the Chinese Communist Party engages in.” The bipartisan bill was also co-sponsored by Reps. Bill Keating (D-Mass.) and Kathy Manning (D-N.C.). The Epoch Times didn’t hear back from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Texas), who led the Senate companion bill in the last Congress, about whether he plans to reintroduce the bill this session.