Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Recently the Royal Australasian College of Physicians released a statement condemning organ trafficking. It set out its opposition to members 'knowingly engaging in research, clinical or education collaborations' with those involved with the coercive procurement or trafficking of human organs. The college's statement is applauded. When it comes to evils in the world today, few can match the systematic forced harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience in Communist China in either scale or depravity. Whether Falun Gong, house Christians, Uighur Muslims or Tibetan Buddhists, victims are having their organs forcibly removed and fed into a vast underground trade. The Communist regime makes every effort to deny and conceal the practice, but the weight of evidence is strong.

The detailed report of the China tribunal headed by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC concluded:

… 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.

A recent study from the ANU's Matthew Robertson also found that China's official statistics on organ transplants are falsified. I simply ask rhetorically: why would the regime falsify data if not to conceal what is really happening? The question needs to be asked: have Australian institutions been indirectly aiding this ghoulish practice? Have we helped to facilitate this heinous abuse of human rights, something which brings to mind the worst crimes of the 20th century?

In a report on the subject last November, details were broadcast of ties between Sydney's Westmead Hospital and China's health commission in Shandong province, including a wide-ranging MOU signed in 2016 containing a provision to collaborate in areas euphemistically described as 'advanced and complex surgery'. Six months after the MOU was signed, a pair of Chinese specialists from a hospital extensively involved in organ transplantation were brought to Australia. A public symposium, including discussion of transplantations, featuring them was cancelled, but only after objections were raised. Westmead were aware of the concerns, yet it was only after strong objections that this event was cancelled. What other activities were these two surgeons engaged in during their two-week visit?

Westmead has personnel ties with a major transplant hospital in China. An Australian expert on islet isolation and xenotransplantation holds a visiting professorship there whilst its senior personnel have been employed as medical researchers at Westmead. There is also published evidence of collaborative research between specialists from the two institutions in a field relevant to transplantation. Australia has pursued in our normal generous spirit, characteristic of our nation, collaboration with China in the medical sphere, but what Australian expertise is unwittingly facilitating ghastly human rights abuses by helping the regime build its capacity to forcibly harvest organs? My concern is that our nation's institutions are indirectly assisting the collaboration or research that may assist the barbaric Chinese organ transplant system.

Westmead is only one institution. What others have similar links? What else do Australians not know about collaboration between our nation's institutions and Chinese organisations involved in this horrid practice? I salute the efforts of the RACP in acknowledging the abuse and discouraging Australian physicians from unwitting collaboration with one of the most horrific human rights abusers in the world today. I call on our institutions to be fully transparent and disclose their collaborations with Chinese transplant institutions. Australians expect nothing less.