Organ Tourism and Cadavers on Display Bill [HL]

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my role as vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary groups on Uighurs and Hong Kong and as a patron of the Coalition for Genocide Response. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has fearlessly shone a light on a practice that, even for the Chinese Communist Party, which is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of its own people, plumbs new depths of depravity. His admirable Bill deserves our wholehearted support, and I fully endorse and agree with all the preceding speeches in the debate today.

The China Tribunal said that it was

“certain—unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt—that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practised for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”

Dr Enver Tohti, a Uighur doctor, described to me how he had been required to remove organs and ordered to

“cut deep and work fast”

on a victim who was still alive. The theft of organs has been described as an almost perfect crime, because no one survives.

However, the crime does not end there: there is a further twist to this infamy. Anonymous, plastinated corpses taken from Chinese prisons have been paraded in a carnival of horrors at money-making exhibitions—a final sneering insult to these victims. In 2018, after one such exhibition, I wrote to the Times, along with Professor Jo Martin, President of the Royal College of Pathologists, and 55 others, saying:

“We believe that the legislation requires reform”.


The Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, now seeks to do precisely that, and he is to be commended warmly for bringing it before your Lordships’ House.

However, we should go further still. The plastinated cadavers indicate that many are young people. The Minister should establish whether it is possible to extract DNA from these corpses to discover something of their origins and ethnic identity. The law did not require the coroner to determine how the corpses exhibited in Birmingham had died. It should.

What of the World Health Organization? Will the Minister tell us why the Government resisted my freedom of information request to publish their correspondence with the WHO on organ harvesting? They should press it hard to lead an international campaign for legislation like this to be enacted elsewhere, combating and ending these criminal practices.

On 22 July it will be 22 years since the start of the persecution of Falun Gong. Jiang Zemin established the 610 Office to eradicate—his word—Falun Gong, practised at the time by 70 million Chinese people. In undercover phone calls recorded during investigations, Chinese doctors said that Jiang Zemin gave direct instructions to harvest organs from Falun Gong. Last week, the Chinese Communist Party said that it wanted Falun Gong outlawed in Hong Kong.

The Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, would demonstrate to the persecuted and cruelly treated—to the 1 million incarcerated Uighurs, Tibetan Buddhists, imprisoned Christians, lawyers, journalists and political dissidents, who are subjected to abductions, disappearances, torture, ethnic cleansing, execution and, as the House of Commons determined in April, genocide in Xinjiang—that we have not forgotten them and will not be intimidated or silenced into submission. The Bill deserves a Second Reading and has my full support.