March 6
CHINA:
Medical Community Disturbed by China’s Organ Centers Report links Wang Lijun
with organ harvesting facility
A recent report by a human rights watchdog group linking would-be defector and
former police chief Wang Lijun with research into organ harvesting has brought
outspoken condemnation of Wang’s mixture of police work and medical innovation
from members of the medical community within the United States.
The report, released by the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution
of Falun Gong (WOIPFG), shows that while serving as police chief in Jinzhou
City, Wang Lijun founded the On-Site Psychology Research Center (OSPRC) on the
subject of human organ transplant inside the building of the Public Security
Bureau.
Prior to Wang’s research, victims of forced organ harvesting were typically
executed with a shot to the head, and then their organs would be harvested. A
team working under Wang’s supervision developed an injection method that is
claimed to yield organs in better condition for transplantation. Wang, upon
receiving an award for this, bragged in a speech that he had overseen thousands
of organ harvesting operations.
David Matas, the international human rights lawyer and investigator into forced
organ harvesting in China (author, with former Canadian Secretary of State
David Kilgour of the 2009 book “Bloody Harvest”) had previously told The Epoch
Times that with the injection method, “In effect they’re not killing by
injection, but paralyzing by injection, and taking the organs out while the
body is still alive.”
‘Terrifying’
Arthur Caplan, professor of Bioethics and director of the Center for Bioethics
at the University of Pennsylvania, reacted to the report, calling it
“terrifying.”
“For a research center run by police authorities to study anything regarding
how people die—on its face—is ethically, legally, highly suspicious. It makes
no sense other than to try and facilitate the immoral practice of killing
people to get their [body] parts.”
“I can’t take anything like it,” said Dr. Caplan, who writes a regular column
on MSNBC.com and often testifies before Congress on bioethics issues.
The report provides well-sourced materials on OSPRC, mostly from the CCP’s own
state-run media reporting. A Chinese state-run newspaper reporter who visited
the OSPRC is quoted in the report, saying that he witnessed the entire process
of “executing a death penalty criminal by injection method.” The reporter
stated, “The execution site was crowded with experts, making it look like a
scientific research lab.”
OSPRC researchers told this same reporter that the data collected would
“contribute greatly to the research on subjects like the dying process of the
criminal, the physiological changes before and after the injection into a
healthy person, the residual toxin in different organs after the injection of
the toxin, psychological changes of a person facing death, organ transplant
after the injection,” and “on-site rescue from the toxin effect.”
Caplan responded that observing people’s psychological reaction during their
dying process is absolutely unaccepted in the international medical community.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” he said.
When asked if there was precedence historically to something similar to OSPRC,
Caplan said the human experiments conducted by Japanese invaders of China
during World War II could be a more provocative analogy than Nazi’s
concentration camps.
The most notorious Japanese human experiment center in China during World War
II was unit 731, located in the Pingfang District of Harbin City in Northeast
China. The center was responsible for some of the most notorious crimes against
humanity in modern history.
Victims were subjected to such human experiments as being hung upside down to
see how long it would take for them to choke to death, having air injected into
their arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism, and having
horse urine injected into their kidneys, among other atrocities.
The WOIPFG report quotes Wang Lijun praising the OSPRC: “For a veteran
policeman, to see someone executed and within minutes to see the transformation
in which this person’s life was extended in the bodies of several other people,
it was soul-stirring.” Wang described the OSPRC to be the “transplant scene,
the very spot of anatomization, the very spot of organ transplantation into the
organ recipient.”
The report also shows Wang Lijun as instrumental in carrying out Bo Xilai’s
campaign to eradicate the practice of Falun Gong. According to a policeman who
worked under Wang in Linzhou City, Wang gave orders regarding Falun Gong that
we must “arrest them all and kill them all,” the report said.
‘Vociferous Condemnation’
Caplan said the OSPRC “requires vociferous condemnation” from the international
medical community. “Governments around the world should be condemning such
activities, too,” he added.
According to Caplan, not doing so would be simply allowing barbaric practices
to be conducted under the banner of science.
The WOIPFG report also indicates that the organ harvesting center is receiving
technological support and participation from Western medical institutes in the
United States and Europe. Caplan said it is hard for him to imagine that
Western medical partners are aware of China’s practice.
He urged the science and medical community to be on guard with China, and any
medical collaboration related to human organs.
To raise awareness over China’s organ harvesting practice, Caplan, who served
as senior editor of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, jointly
wrote an editorial piece with Howard A. Rockman, incoming editor-in-chief, and
Laurence A. Turka. The article called on American medical journal editors and
editorial boards to boycott research data and papers on human organ studies
from China.
University of California at Southern California (UCLA) professor Gabriel
Danovitch, M.D., who serves as the medical director of Kidney and Pancreas
Transplant Program at UCLA, said he finds the report about OSPRC “terribly
disturbing.”
Dr. Danovitch is actively involved in the development of national management
guidelines for clinical transplant care. Together with medical colleagues M. E.
Shapiro and J. Lavee, the three expressed grave concerns over China’s organ
harvesting practice in an article published in the American Transplant Journal
in February 2011.
Danovitch and his colleagues wrote, “We are distressed and outraged by the fact
that, despite uniform and consistent international condemnation, those
euphemistically described as ‘donating’ their organs and dutifully recorded in
a national registry were prisoners, whose ‘severe brain injury’ was most likely
a result of execution by a gunshot to the head.”
They urged international medical societies and journals to be critical of
Chinese transplant centers. “As history has painfully taught us, in the face of
a self-admitted crime against humanity, it is our moral obligation as
individuals and a community to raise our voice and do our utmost to bring the
process to a complete halt.
“If another 18,000 executed prisoners with ‘severe brain injury in all cases’
become organ donors in China, and we have not done our utmost to put an end to
this practice, we will all have blood on our hands,” concluded the article.
When asked what the international medical community can do to help, Caplan
said, “We need to continue to urge medical journals around the world to endorse
the notion of boycott. We need to continuously speak out in professional
meetings and forums.”
(source: The Epoch Times)
*****************************
2 Chinese street motorbike racers may get death penalty
2 street motorbike racers in China's Shanghai city who were detained and
charged with dangerous driving may face the death penalty in line with new
guidelines, say police.
Earlier, racers faced less than 15 days in jail in case their activities had no
untoward consequences, the Shanghai Daily reported.
According to the city police, the 2 men -- identified as Jin and Zhang -- met
at about 8 p.m. in a garage on Leyuan Road in Pudong New Area, and drove out a
Yamaha and a Honda, both powerful motorcycles with 1,000cc engines.
The street bike racing occurred on the night of Feb 3.
Police noticed the duo on the surveillance cameras, speeding on the road and
repeatedly jumping traffic signals.
Patrolling officers tried to stop the 2 but they did not slow down and escaped,
police said.
Jin and Zhang were later identified by the police from surveillance camera
footage and detained and their motorcycles confiscated.
Jin's Yamaha was unlicensed while Zhang was using another person's licence
plates on his Honda, police found.
(source: New Kerala)
IRAN:
Iran to execute 5 Ahwazis ‘within days
Iranian authorities informed the families of 5 detainees from the
Arab-dominated Ahwaz province that their sons will be hanged in public “within
days” for allegedly killing a security member and wounding another in 2011, a
local human rights activist told Al Arabiya on Tuesday.
The detainees include 3 brothers – Abdelrahman, Taha, and Jamsheed Haidari –
and their cousin Mansour Haidari and Ameer Moawya. They were arrested in 2011
and charged with the murder of a security member and the wounding of another.
Their families say the detainees confessed to the murder under torture.
Karim Abdian, director of the Ahwaz Human Rights Organization, told Al Arabiya
that the execution plan comes ahead of the April 15 commemoration of uprisings
that took place in several Iranian cities in 2005 in protest against a
government program designed to change the demographic structure of areas
dominated by ethnic Arabs. According to that government plan, ethnic Arabs
would become a minority within 10 years.
During the April 15 uprisings, known as the Bloody Friday, dozens of
Arab-Iranians were killed, 500 injured, and 250 arrested during protests in the
city of Ahwaz.
Abdian explained that by executing people at this period in time, Iranian
authorities seek to spread fear among residents and thwart them from organizing
protests on April 15.
Abdian criticized “the silence” of Iranian political parties and human rights
organizations in the face of increased “security crackdown on ethnic Arab
citizens of Iran.”
(source: Iran Human Rights)
_______________________________________________
DeathPenalty mailing list
DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu
http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty
Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A free service of WashLaw
http://washlaw.edu
(785)670.1088
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
