PureInsight | February 23, 2015
[PureInsight.org] On January 30, 2015, the White House officially responded to the joint petition on their website regarding the investigation and condemnation of the CCP’s illegal live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners and persecution of freedom of belief.
The White House responded, “The U.S. government opposes illegal or unethical harvesting or trafficking of human organs. We have urged China to cease harvesting organs from executed prisoners and have raised this issue with senior Chinese officials. China’s leaders have announced a pledge to abolish the practice of taking human organs for transplant from executed prisoners, although we are aware of continued reports of such practices. We take such allegations very seriously and will continue to monitor the situation and the actions that Chinese authorities take to fulfill this commitment.”
The White House pointed out, “The Chinese government’s human rights practices and treatment of Falun Gong practitioners remain causes for concern. Since 1999, the Secretary of State has designated China as a “Country of Particular Concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act for having engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom. As reported in the State Department’s 2013 Country Report on Human Rights Practices and the 2013 International Religious Freedom Report, the Chinese government’s respect for and protection of the right to religious freedom have deteriorated.”
The open call for petition signatures on the White House’s “We the People” website beginning on December 20, 2012 demanded that the Obama administration investigate and publicly condemn the CCP’s crime of live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners. The petition emphasized that live organ harvesting is a crime against humanity and has been happening in China for over a decade. As a world leader in the defense of human rights, the United States has a moral obligation to stand out and publicly address this issue.
The petition was created by Arthur Caplan, an international medical ethics professor, Alejandro Centurion, a Californian neurologist, and Xu Jianchao, a professor at Yale medical school. There are currently 34,000 signatures on the petition.
Translated from: http://news.zhengjian.org/node/24580
