China ‘still using prisoners’ organs for transplants’

BEIJING — 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.

But organs from prisoners, including those on death row, can still be used for transplants in China, according to Chinese news reports.

“They just reclassified prisoners as citizens,” said Chinese-born Dr Huige Li, from the University of Mainz in Germany.

The announcement in December by Mr Huang Jiefu, a former deputy health minister and chairman of the National Health and Family Planning Commission’s Human Organ and Transplant Committee, was “an administrative trick”, said Dr 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 re-labelling 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.

In January, the ruling Communist Party’s publication People’s Daily reported that voluntary donations from citizens had become the sole source of organs for transplant. It then quoted Mr Huang as explaining: “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.”

Previously, multiple medical centres operated, often secretly, to procure organs from prisoners or poor migrant workers and supply them to politically well-connected or wealthy patients, according to officials and researchers. Now, the government says it is working to create a single pool that will be fairly managed, with organs distributed according to medical need.

China began to solicit organs from the public in 2010. In a 2011 article in the medical journal Lancet, Mr Huang said about 65 per cent of transplants in China had been done with organs from dead donors, of which more than 90 per cent were executed prisoners. The rest had been provided by living donors.

Since 2007, a law on organ transplants banned trafficking in organs and removing them without written consent, although it did not mention prisoners.

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, Dr Li said. “When he said, ‘We will completely stop using prisoners’ organs,’ he meant stop using that illegal component,” Dr Li said.

Still, China deserves credit for trying to change the system by encouraging more voluntary donations outside prisons, Dr Kloiber said. “We have to acknowledge they are willing to discuss this,” he said.

Anecdotal evidence from Chinese doctors points to progress, but also suggests continuing problems.

Many Chinese are reluctant to donate organs because of Confucian traditions that consider the body a gift from parents that should be buried or cremated intact. Also, many people have been reluctant to donate because of a widespread assumption that in a corrupt system their organs would not be fairly used. THE NEW YORK TIMES