When reports first emerged from China in 2006 that state-run hospitals were killing prisoners of conscience to sell their organs, it seemed too horrible to be true.
However, a new documentary is about to blow the lid on the illegal organ trade that is now allegedly worth a staggering US$1 billion a year. This despite the fact 10,000 organs are transplanted in China every year, yet there are only a tiny number of people on the official donor register.
‘Human Harvest: China’s Organ Trafficking’ will show how once researchers around the world - including human rights lawyer David Matas and former Canadian member of parliament David Kilgour - began to uncover the gory details, the true picture was soon uncovered.
In 2006 a non-governmental coalition was formed called ‘The Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of the Falun Gong in China’.
They requested that Mr Kilgour and Mr Matas investigate allegations of organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners in China because of their extensive academic and political backgrounds and prior involvement in human rights activism.
The damning evidence they uncovered suggests that tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed on demand to supply an ongoing illegal organ transplant industry.
How these two Nobel Peace Prize nominees pieced together the evidence and continue to fight against this unimaginable horror is told in the program.
The pair have spent years investigating organ trafficking in China, and it's claimed that political prisoners are being used as live organ donors.
They believe the organs come from members of the Falun Gong movement – a quasi-religious group with millions of followers, which is banned by the Chinese Government.
‘I can testify that this hospital forcibly removed organs, such as livers and corneas,’ says former worker Annie of allegations that members of the banned Falun Gong movement were killed for their organs.
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