Initiators

Professor Arthur Caplan

Mitty Professor of Bioethics, Director NYU Grossman School of Medicine, USA Arthur Caplan is a renowned professor and researcher of medical ethics, who is widely published and an expert on the topic of ethics in transplant medicine. Dr. Caplan is head of the Division of Bioethics at New York Univ. Langone Medical Center. He was former chair of the Dept. of Medical Ethics, and the Sidney D. Caplan Professor of Bioethics at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia.

Theresa Chu, Chairperson, Steering Committee of UDCPFOH

Theresa Chu is an international human rights lawyer and the Chairperson of the Steering Committee of Universal Declaration on Combating and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting. Since the onset of the persecution against Falun Gong in 1999, she has defended victims on a pro bono basis, and is actively involved in litigation to bring suit against former Chinese Party Chief Jiang Zemin, and other CCP officials involved in organ harvesting crimes.

The UDCPFOH is launched jointly by five initiating NGOs:

Introduction

With the following statements, the initiating organizations hereby call on all people of the world to step forward and support the UDCPFOH:

  1. World War II afflicted humankind with irredeemable anguish and loss. It also propelled the international criminal justice system to punish barbaric human rights abuses as a “crime of genocide,” “crime of torture,” and “crime against humanity,” recognized as among the most severe offences by international criminal law. Gross human rights abuses persist within a climate of secrecy and remain undeterred, easily ignored through political and economic influences wielded by totalitarian regimes. Consequently, additional deaths and untold suffering sees no end. Forced organ harvesting by the CCP, a most diabolical crime impacting millions of people, is one such atrocity.
  2. Over the years, investigative reports conducted by international organizations, human rights groups, and governments as well as expert analyses have all concluded that the largest number of victims of forced organ harvesting are the Falun Gong. The independent “China Tribunal” established in London in 2019 asserted that the killing of detainees to obtain their organs for transplants continues in China and that the primary victims include imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners. Crimes against humanity against the Falun Gong and Uyghurs have been proved beyond reasonable doubt.
  3. The crimes committed during World War II resulted in the adoption of several important international conventions on human rights. During the 20th century, when wars and abuses wrecked human rights, freedoms and justice, the international community consolidated their consensus to safeguard basic human rights in the form of declarations and international conventions and implemented them around the world. The UDCPFOH clearly upholds the core standards represented in the most important international conventions on human rights within the last 70 years and uses these standards as guiding principles. These conventions include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine: Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (1997), and Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking in Human Organs (2015).
  4. Forced organ harvesting is not only used to carry out a “cleansing” and genocide of Falun Gong practitioners and ethnic minority groups, such as Uyghurs, but also implicated in garnering a massive economic profit. Such a profit is derived from organ transplantation itself, as well as transnational organ sale, transplant tourism, and organ brokerage. Therefore, to combat and prevent forced organ harvesting requires endeavors made at the international and national levels simultaneously.
  5. At the national level, the UDCPFOH expounds that all governments shall take the necessary legislative and other measures to criminalize forced organ harvesting under their domestic law to strictly punish those responsible for this crime and that the judiciary shall initiate and ensure effective criminal investigation and prosecution of any and all offences. The administrative systems of all governments shall bar entry to any person known to be directly or indirectly participating in forced organ harvesting, shall dissuade their own medical professionals from training Chinese doctors or medical personnel in transplant surgery, and shall urge medical journals to reject publications about the “Chinese experience” in transplant medicine and the like. Meanwhile, each country should enhance the public’s awareness of the unlawfulness of forced organ harvesting. The UDCPFOH stresses international cooperation on the collection, analysis and exchange of relevant information of illicitly obtained human organs and on the investigation into abuses related to forced organ harvesting.