TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill earlier this week aimed at combating unethical organ harvesting by doctors and authorities in China.

A press release from New Jersey representative Chris Smith, who authored the bill, said it is intended to target the “ghoulish industry of stealing young people’s internal organs,” which amounts to crimes against humanity. If signed into law, the bill, HR 1154, will require regular reports on organ transplantation in foreign countries, with a special focus on China, in order for a country to qualify for foreign assistance from the U.S.

The bill will also require strict penalties, including sanctions as well as civil and criminal punishments, for individuals and organizations that are implicated in the unethical harvesting of internal organs. The bill also includes provisions for stronger checks to ensure organs brought to the U.S. for transplantation, or U.S. citizens going abroad for such procedures, do not involve organs forcibly harvested from unwilling victims.

According to HR1154, civil penalties for anyone implicated in such practices may amount to fines of up to US$250,000 (NT$7.6 million). Criminal penalties for individuals implicated in forced organ harvesting may amount to US$1 million (NT$30.5 million) and up to 20 years in prison.

The press release mentions a 2022 house hearing that revealed the CCP regime’s horrific human rights abuses, particularly the harvesting of organs from political prisoners including Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs in the concentration camps of Xinjiang.

“State-sponsored forced organ harvesting is big business for Xi and the Chinese Communist Party and shows absolutely no signs of abating,” said Smith. “We must act decisively,” the representative added.

There has been much speculation about the extent of China’s forced organ harvesting operations over the years, with most evidence based on first-hand accounts of individuals involved. Smith’s press release mentions two such individuals, a Chinese doctor and a security official, who testified before a House committee that they were involved in prisoner executions to procure hearts for transplant procedures.

Despite many first-hand accounts, a lack of transparency in China’s security and medical institutions has made it very difficult to establish data-based evidence to understand the extent of unethical organ harvesting in China.

That was until a study published in 2022 used reports in Chinese language medical journals to collect a wide swath of data on doctors whose own reports indicate that they violated the “dead donor rule” when extracting hearts from living prisoners. The study, written by Matthew Peterson and Jacob Levee, makes it clear that heart procurement from still-living patients is a regular occurrence in China.

A summary of their findings was published in Tablet magazine in June 2022.