Health and Care Bill

Lord Ribeiro Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 4th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 265 I will also speak to Amendment 282. I am glad to have the support of the noble Lords, Lord Ribeiro and Lord Alton, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay and Lady Northover, for our endeavours.

Article 3(2) of the Universal Declaration on Combating and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting states:

“The killing of vulnerable prisoners for the purpose of harvesting and selling their organs for transplant is an egregious and intolerable violation of the fundamental right to life.”


My two amendments seek to prevent UK citizens’ complicity in forced organ harvesting by amending the Human Tissue Act to ensure that UK citizens cannot travel to countries such as China for organ transplantation and to put a stop to the dreadful travelling circus of body exhibitions that sources deceased bodies from China.

As noble Lords know, I come from Birmingham, where in 2018 an exhibition called Real Bodies by Imagine Exhibitions visited the National Exhibition Centre. It consisted of real corpses and body parts that had gone through a process of plastination, whereby silicone plastic is injected into the body tissue to create real-life mannequins or plastinated bodies. The exhibit advertised it as using

“real human specimens that have been respectfully preserved to explore the complex inner workings of the human form in a refreshing and thought-provoking style.”

But those deceased human bodies and body parts are unclaimed bodies with no identity documents or consent, sourced from Dalian Hoffen Bio-Technique in Dalian, China. Notably, Dalian labour lamp from 1999 to 2013 was notorious for its severe torturing of Falun Gong practitioners, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has reminded the House on many occasions.

The commercial exploitation of body parts in all its forms is surely unethical and unsavoury, but when it is combined with mass killings by an authoritarian state, we cannot stand by and do nothing. In 2019, the China Tribunal, led by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, stated:

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


Most recently, further evidence was heard during the course of the Uyghur Tribunal, including from Sayragul Sauytbay, who testified during the June hearings that she discovered medical files detailing Uighur detainees’ blood types and results of liver tests while she was working at a Uighur camp. In June this year, 12 UN special procedure experts raised the issue of forced organ harvesting with the Chinese Government in response, as they said, to “credible information” that

“Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Muslims and Christians”

are being killed for their organs in China.

The recent findings of the Uyghur Tribunal, again chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, were profoundly disturbing. We discussed some of this in our debate on genocide only a few days ago, but I think it bears repeating. The tribunal concluded:

“Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs—with some estimates well in excess of a million—have been detained by


Chinese

“authorities without any, or any remotely sufficient reason, and subjected to acts of unconscionable cruelty, depravity and inhumanity … Many of those detained have been tortured for no reason, by such methods as: pulling off fingernails; beating with sticks; detaining in ‘tiger chairs’ where feet and hands were locked in position for hours or days without a break; confined in containers up to the neck in cold water; and detained in cages so small that standing or lying was impossible … Detained women—and men—have been raped and subjected to extreme sexual violence … Detainees were fed with food barely sufficient to sustain life and frequently insufficient to sustain health, food that could be withheld at whim to punish or humiliate.”

This is the context in which we debate these amendments. I feel a sense of, shall I say, sadness, at least, that this is the opening day of the China Winter Olympics.

Currently, human tissue legislation in this country covers organ transplantation within the UK itself, but it does not cover British citizens travelling abroad for transplants, and British taxpayers’ money has to pay for anti-rejection medication for those people who then come back to the UK and go to the National Health Service, regardless of where the organ was sourced. According to the excellent NHS Blood and Transplant, between 2010 and 2020, there were 29 cases on the UK transplant registry of patients being followed up in the UK after receiving a transplant in China. This is a billion-pound business in China, using the bodies of executed prisoners—mainly prisoners of conscience.

The Human Tissue Act 2004 has strict consent and documentation requirements for human tissues sourced in the UK, but it does not restrict human tissues from abroad in this way; it is merely advisory. My amendments seek to amend the Human Tissue Act in the following ways.

First, they would prohibit a UK citizen from travelling outside the UK and receiving any controlled material for the purpose of organ transplantation when the organ donor or the organ donor’s next of kin had not provided free, informed and specific consent. Secondly, they would prohibit a UK citizen from travelling outside the UK and receiving any controlled material for the purpose of organ transplantation when a living donor or third party receives a financial gain or comparable advantage; or, if from a deceased donor, a third party receives financial gain or comparable advantage. Thirdly, it would provide for the offence in Section 32 of the Human Tissue Act 2004 to be prohibited even if the offence did not take place in the UK, if the person had a close connection to our country. Fourthly, it would provide for regulations for patient-identifiable records and an annual report on instances of UK citizens receiving transplant procedures outside the UK by NHS Blood and Transplant. Finally, it would provide for imported bodies on display to have the same consent requirements as those sourced from the UK.

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration on Combating and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting says:

“All governments shall combat and prevent forced organ harvesting by providing for the criminalisation of certain acts and facilitate the criminal prosecution of forced organ harvesting both at the national and international levels.”


I believe we must take action internationally and in the UK to do all we can to prevent this abhorrent practice. I know from the success we had in the medicines Bill that a change in the law of this country has a much wider impact; it gives great encouragement to those brave people fighting these practices in China and globally. I very much hope the House will support this. I beg to move.

[Lord Ribeiro (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise for not speaking in the Second Reading debate, for reasons of ill health.

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who has set out the case against genocide most convincingly. As he said, there is a risk of repetition, as we covered so many of these issues in the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill in 2020 and in the noble Lord’s Organ Tourism and Cadavers on Display Bill only last year. I said then that the Human Tissue Act 2004 made it clear that written consent was required while the person was alive before donated bodies or body parts could be displayed.

The Government were supportive of our amendment in the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill and the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, who I am pleased to see in her place, said the Government would undertake

“to strengthen the Human Tissue Authority’s code of practice”.—[Official Report, 12/1/21; col. 705.]

The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, who was here earlier, stated in summing up that the new code laid before Parliament in June 2021 was clear that

“the same consent expectations should apply for imported bodies and body parts as apply for such material sourced domestically.”

In relation to exhibitions such as “Real Bodies”, which the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned and to which our Amendment 265 applies, the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said

“it would need proof of the donor’s specific consent to be displayed publicly after death. If it failed to provide such proof”,—[Official Report, 16/7/21; cols. 2123-24.]

that would prevent a licence being issued. In relation to organs for transplantation, our Amendment 282 makes it clear that consent must be given and that there must be no evidence of genocide in the country from which the organs are sourced.

As a former president of the Royal College of Surgeons, I associate myself with the statement of December 2021 on the abuse of Uighurs in China made by the British Medical Association and the presidents of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges—of which the Royal College of Surgeons is a member—the Royal College of Anaesthetists and the Royal College of Pathologists. It said:

“We … and the organisations we represent, in advance of the report of the Uyghur Tribunal, express our grave concern regarding the situation in China and the continuing abuse of the Uyghur population … as well as other minorities.”


The UN special rapporteurs have continued to raise concerns surrounding organ harvesting from Uighurs in China, which the evidence overwhelmingly suggests continues to this day, with hearts, livers, kidneys and corneas being the most commonly taken.

In January this year, the BMA condemned the appalling involvement of doctors in China in what was a fundamental abuse of human rights and genocide against the Uighurs. It urged Her Majesty’s Government to exert pressure on the Chinese Government to stop these inhumane practices and to allow the UN investigators into Xinjiang region. The Minister may wish to comment on the Government’s response.

I will leave your Lordships with a quote from Dr Zoe Greaves, chairman of the BMA ethics committee. She said:

“It is a doctor’s duty to help improve health and ease suffering, not to inflict it on others. The use of medical science and expertise to commit atrocities is abominable and represents an appalling antithesis to every doctor’s pledge to ‘first, do no harm’”.

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Finally, we are not convinced that extending existing offences would deter a determined organ tourist. All indications suggest that the scale of organ tourism by UK patients is small. This informs our belief that the best way to tackle it is to continue on the path of improving the rates and outcomes of legitimate organ donations while maintaining the highest standards of care for those in need of an organ. I will write to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on his questions about the convention, but let me add that we are working with key stakeholders to assess what more can be done about this issue and are committed to informing those in need of an organ transplant of the legal, health and ethical impacts of purchasing an organ overseas. As I noted, our belief is that the best approach is to focus on continuing to increase the availability of legitimately donated organs.

[Lord Ribeiro (Con)]

My Lords, would it be possible to collect data to substantiate what my noble friend has said about the reduction in people going overseas to get organs for transplantation? Can we get some figures to be absolutely clear that the numbers are reducing and not continuing, as some of us fear?

[Earl Howe (Con)]

I expect it is possible to capture some data but, of course, there will always be cases of people going overseas who are invisible to those who collect data, and we can never guard against that.