China has announced that it will cease the controversial practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners. China, which harvests over half of all its donated organs from executed prisoners, has set a new deadline for the policy change–the beginning of 2015.
Chinese officials have promised to end organ harvesting from prisoners by Jan.1. China “will completely stop” using the organs of executed inmates, according to the head of the Chinese Committee of Organ Donation, Huang Jiefu, as reported by the Southern Metropolis Daily.
Ninety percent of Chinese organ transplants from deceased donors come from those executed in prison. And China consistently has the highest numbers for executions worldwide. China executed approximately six times as many people last year as the next highest ranking country–Iran–and about three times as many people as the rest of the world combined. The numbers for Chinese executions are not exact, however, because China has made executions state secrets legally, and rights group Amnesty International, which keeps track of executions globally, was forced to abandon efforts to record executions in the Asian nation.
Read more: China Executed Three times More People Last Year Than Rest of the World Combined – Report
Over half of all organs used in transplants in China come from executed donors.
Human rights advocates claim that at least 65,000 such donors were executed for political crimes between the late 1990s when the practice began and the current day. These include Uighur activists, Tibetan monks and protesters, and primarily Falun Gong adherents.
Human rights groups have expressed concern that the organs have been harvested without prior consent or after pressuring prisoners to sign a release, and that a black market for human organs exists in China.
Due to Chinese beliefs about death, China experiences a chronic organ shortage. Chinese tradition has it that a corpse must be buried without mutilation, and very few Chinese accept the removal of organs when someone in their family dies. Of each million Chinese, only 0.6 percent agree to donate an organ.
Around 10,000 organ transplants are completed in China annually–well below the 300,000 transplants required. The costs are significant. A liver transplant, for example, may cost around $81,000 and a kidney transplant around $40,000.
The Jan. 1 deadline is not the first such promise China has made. China previously promised to end the practice by last November. There have also been concerns expressed with regard to loopholes in the Jan. 1 ban.
By James Haleavy