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Before organs are harvested, Chinese law requires written consent by the prisoner or his family. However, Human Rights Watch claims that “the consent of prisoners to use their organs after death … [is] rarely sought.” According to Chinese law, “The corpses or organs of executed criminals may be provided for us in any [of] the following circumstances: (1) No one claims the body or the family refuses to claim the body; (2) The executed criminal has volunteered to have his corpse provided to a medical treatment or health unit for use; (3) The family consents to the use of the corpse.” In actuality, the Chinese judicial system rarely informs families that a prisoner’s organs are about to be harvested, and in the few cases in which families do find out, poverty often prevents them from traveling to the execution to claim the body.
Furthermore, “condemned prisoners are not told that their appeals against the death sentence have been rejected until only a few hours before their actual executions, nor are their families informed.” Official procedure following execution requires that the body be cremated and that the ashes be returned to the family. As a result, families have no way of knowing whether organs have been harvested or not. If a family wants to receive the body intact, it is often unable to meet the fees and bribes that are inevitably required. Although numerous reports confirm that guards coerce prisoners in the hours before death into indicating consent for donation, cremation makes it difficult to verify whether a prisoner’s organs have been harvested.
There is a roughly linear correlation in China between the number of death sentences and the number of kidney transplants, suggesting a morbid conflict of interest when it comes to the legal decision between life and death. According to the Indiana Law Review, “Between 1988 and 1996, the number of kidneys transplanted in China rose fourfold. Between 1990 and 1996, the number of executions grew by 600 percent.” Human Rights Watch concludes that “the practice of using executed prisoners’ organs for transplant purposes creates an undesirable incentive for the authorities to refrain from either abolishing capital punishment or reducing the scope of its application.” The judicial process has been further influenced by the capital influx from wealthy foreign consumers of organ transplant services. Not only do foreigners undermine the resources available to local Chinese people in need of organ transplants, but they also perpetuate the bribery and corruption that plague the Chinese judicial system.
Furthermore, organ harvesting conflicts with traditional Chinese moral and religious beliefs. Many Chinese are heavily influenced by Confucian and Buddhist ideology: “Devout Buddhists … accept reincarnation as a basic religious tenet,” while the “Confucian tenet of filial piety requires that a body be returned to the ancestors in an intact state.” Specifically prohibitive to organ donation is the belief that the “kidney is the storehouse of yin and yang.” These beliefs clash with medical practice most severely in the case of “people who have died before their time, [such as] through … executions.” Although organ transplant would conflict with some Chinese traditions under any circumstances, harvesting from coerced prisoners brings with it a particularly grave insult to dignity in death.
Some human rights organizations have also attacked the objectification of prisoners implied by organ harvesting. Typically, execution is performed by a single shot to the back of the head. Human Rights Watch asserts that this method “allows the undamaged harvesting of such organs as kidneys and livers.” But according to Amnesty International, “There are reports that this [procedure] may be altered to a shot to the heart if the prisoner’s corneas are to be harvested.” In other words, execution procedure is manipulated according to the organs to be harvested. Additionally, the definition of death itself is altered during executions for the purpose of harvesting organs: “according to Chinese legal authorities, some executions are even deliberately mishandled to ensure that the prisoners are not yet dead when their organs are removed.”
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