[music] good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to tonight's lecture sorry about the late start it's a city traffic thing at a few spots of rain and the whole place goes into gridlock but i'm delighted to welcome you here this evening my name is wendy rogers and i work in the philosophy department and
i'm deputy director of the macquarie university center for research agency research agency and values which is sponsoring tonight's event first i'd like to begin our proceedings by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the macquarie university land what a battle plan of the derrick nation
whose cultures and customs have nurtured and continue to nurture this land since dreamtime i would also like to pay my respects to elder's past present and future of the designation and extend that respect to other indigenous people who gets to maybe prison today the order of events this evening is first of all i'm going to invite professor katrina
mackenzie to say a few words about the center of the region agency values and ethics which we call cave for short before introducing our speaker for this evening i'd like to let you know that this session is being recorded and when it comes to question time it will be very important to ask your questions into the
microphone so that those are captured for the record as well so i'd like to introduce katrina mackenzie professor of philosophy at macquarie university and associate dean for research in the faculty of arts and katrina's got a long distinguished career as a philosopher which i won't go into here but it's my very great pleasure to introduce her as
the director of cave to welcome you all here tonight thank you wendy and i'll be very brief so that we can get on with the lecturers as quickly as possible so cave in the faculty of arts are honored to welcome david maters who's a distinguished international human rights lawyer as a speaker at the annual public lecture of
the macquarie university research center for agency values and ethics as when you mentioned we call it cave for short so i'll be talking about cave from now on i'll just say something very brief about cave and then all our hand back to when you will be the master of ceremonies tonight so cave is one of two university research centers located in the faculty
about it was established in 2011 and it fosters interdisciplinary theoretical research on human agency in the self moral cognition the foundations of moral and legal norms and moral and legal responsibility it also aims to address practical issues at the intersection of ethics law medicine and cognitive science the
center has a strong reputation for research excellence many of caves research projects are funded by grants from the australian research council and a number of a center members recipients of fellowships from the australian research council cave also has a strong commitment to mentoring junior researchers including postgraduate
students and postdoctoral fellows through supervision and the opportunity to host center events and workshops and so on we have a lively program events throughout the year are attracting both international and national visitors to macquarie university and many of our members are actively engage with the
media and the broader public the center's organized into five research clusters they're there they're listed there and tonight's lecture series under the auspices of two of a clusters the cluster on applied ethics bioethics and clinical ethics and the cluster on human rights and social justice so wendy is actually the cluster later for the
cluster or applied ethics bioethics and clinical ethics and you as i said we'll be introducing david and will be the master of ceremonies 24 tonight so thank you for coming i'm sure there's going to be a very interesting and challenging lecture thanks katrina it's my very great pleasure to introduce david maters. david
international human rights lawyer author and researcher based in winnipeg currently acting senior honoree counts of bourbon i breath canada he served the government of canada in numerous positions including as a member of the canadian delegation to the united nations conference on international crime court and various other
international conferences and task force's is involved with different organizations including the canadian helsinki watch group beyond borders amnesty international and the canadian canceled for refugees david service has been recognized by numerous awards and honors these include the manitoba bar
association distinguished service award the order of canada the canadian bar association national citizenship and immigration section achievement award and then its international society for human rights with section human rights prize in 2010 in 2006 david co-authored a book bloody harvest organ harvesting found on practitioners in china with
co-author the honorable david kill goal both mr. mattison mr. kilgore were nominated for the nobel peace prize for this piece of work and david will touch upon the contents of this tonight with david kilgour and a third or third ethan goodman they are the author of the 2016 investigative report an update to bloody harvest and the slaughter this report
meticulously examines the transplant programs of hundreds of hospitals in china drawing on media reports official propaganda medical journals hospital websites and deleted websites found in archives he has a large range of other work but without further ado i very much welcome here tonight david it's lovely to meet you having first met you on film
as it were over a year ago and very much forward to tonight's lecture okay thank you very much i am going to talk on policy and law in australia to prevent complicity in for transplant abuse in a general sort of way in a generic sort of wave it before i want to do that i want to talk about how i got into this and kind of a factual
background context that got me into this issue of our mechanisms to prevent complicity in foreign transferred abuse i am as you heard a an international human rights lawyer and i do a lot of refugee work at my private practice i'm involved it generally in researching writing talking about his human rights abuses i've written a number of
different books on those issues and very often when there is a human rights abuse victim community will come to me and ask me to do something about it and and that's how i got involved in the issue organ transplant abuse there was a woman with the pseudonym annie who in march two thousand six made a public statement in washington dc that are ex-husband had
been harvesting the corneas of the falun gong practitioners between 2003 in 2005 and cg and china that other doctors in the same hospital been harvesting other organs the bodies of the victims were were cremated the organs were being sold to transplant tourists high sums the chinese government said this was not true issued a statement to that effect
you know a an organization ngo called the coalition to investigate persecution against the falun gong came to me came to david kilgour asked us to investigate this didn't give us any money didn't give us any data did it didn't give us any direction just asked us to do it and i agreed to do it partly because i realized this was the sort of thing from
my experience with the international human rights world it would be difficult to find an ngo or the media or parliamentarians to do what we are being told straight-up was there's no victims to interview they're dead and there's not even a corpse to autopsy because their bodies are cremated there are no witnesses because
everything happens in enclosed environment is just perpetrators and victims zer there is no crime scene it's it's an operating theatre which is a cleaned-up completely afterwards there is no documentation publicly available that it's actually going to tell you exactly what happened because this is going to be a secret documentation
behind closed doors so the issue became how do you either prove or disprove that this was so and it it's it's a difficult question but for me involved in refugee lights it's not that unusual because i often have clients coming to my door saying this happen to me that happened to me and is true or is it not and so what i did with david kilgour is
trying to figure out whether this was true or not and we weren't so much inclined to try to find out that it was true as to either prove or disprove it in my initial inclination was to try to disprove it because i like to think better of humanity than that people are being killed for their organs but anyhow we constructed various evidentiary
trails that would either prove or disprove the allegation and eventually came to the conclusion that it was happening and not just in seattle but real china not just during the time that any said her husband was working but from 2001 to the date of our report the the felon gone it's a set of exercise with the spiritual foundation started
1992 by a teacher lee honggi it's a it's a blending and updating of traditional chinese exercise and spiritual beliefs it's a kind of a blending of the chi-gong set of exercises the best known of which i guess is tai chi and the end the buddhist and taoist tradition it was originally encouraged by the
communist party as being good for health and when they were withdrawing money from the health system because the shift from socialism to capitalism in this was a way of cutting down on expenses in the health system and they were actively promoting it at the they were conducting exercises embassies and consulates around the world but at some point it
got too popular for them i the according to government of china estimate server in 1999 seven years later from the date of its starting 70 200 million practitioners more than membership the communist party which was 60 million there were 3,000 practice stations in beijing alone because the the people did the exercises outdoors and groups and at
this point uh the the party took ideological frightened but its supremacy because although falun gong is not political it's not communists and its spiritual the parties 80s so it was never legally banned but the party decided to repress it they decided to repress it in june 1999a they launched out the repression campaign in june 1999
in july 1999 it led to a lot of protests because the people i mean i mean for the people actually engaging exercise they thought maybe somebody mistake had been made because they didn't see any harm in the exercises and the party had been encouraging it just before the so there was a little protests and this led to a lot of arrests in the hundreds of
thousands are the falun gong practitioners quickly became the number one population in arbitrary detention in china they represented to one-half to two-thirds of that population and became the number-one said torture victims uh they were being asked to account if they didn't count they were tortured if they didn't recant after torture they were
just arbitrarily and indefinitely detained many of them wouldn't indicate who they were when they were tested because before when they had been arrested and released their immediate environment was victimized for not for for not reporting them for not stopping them from practicing and so the second time they went in protest they wouldn't
say who they were as a result of which the family didn't know where they were any jealous didn't know who they were and they became a very vulnerable population anyhow of we could see uh when we did our work that this this population is very vilified personally personalized human eyes but with some of the other factors that led us to the
conclusion that we did that this was happening was a phone calls we had investigators calling into hospitals pretending to be relatives of patients who need transplants asking the hospital's if they had organs of falun gong practitioners for sale on the basis that the fallen garner exercised and ate be healthy inner organs would be healthy
and about fifteen percent of the calls we got admission throughout china saying yes please come down we have these organs for sale and and you can even today hear those calls they've been taped transcribed translated i mean did you hear them of course you have to know chinese but you can see the transcriptions so that was what evidence
you tell the a second evidence shows the the blood testing i mean we would talk to people who've been out of jail on a china and both the falun gong and on falun gong practitioners alike with telus city the person said prison sentence to death the falun gong practitioners were being blood tested an organ examine but none of the rest of
the prisoners and they weren't being it that wasn't being done for their health because they were being tortured to recount and and they weren't being treated and injuries uh and uh yet it is necessary for transplants because you need blood type compatibility you need sighs compatibility you need ideally some form of tissue type
compatibility so that was a another evidentiary trail a a third one that we're looking at was volume said that the chinese quickly became a number two in the world at least according to their own figures a after the united states in terms of transplant forms without any identifiable sources they said it was donors but they didn't have a donation
system i is a then switch to saying it was prisoner sentenced to death and then executed uh and and they certainly were sourcing some from their butt person sentenced to death and then execute it wasn't a very viable source for high volumes because the law said the prison sentence to death had to be executed
within seven days of sentence and they couldn't they weren't available all the time everywhere there's also a very high rate of thought hepatitis b within the prison system up to sixty percent which meant a lot of these person sentenced to death were not really viable because of the contamination who have hepatitis b there was also not a national organ
distribution system which meant that the organs had to be provided by a place nearby he a so there wasn't really an accountant for the volume and and in fact and this is what our more recent update is that we realized that the volume we started looking at the figures ourselves was a lot higher than the figures that the government had been
officially saying with the volume of a cube are nice and a gunman i this tune did this massive report looking at individual hospitals where we came to the conclusion that the volume was uh between 60,000 hundred thousand a year rather than 10,000 a year which of course raised even more acutely question where all these organs were coming from
another disturbing feature was the fact that organs by transplant tours and it could be ordered on demand a people could make appointments months in advance for particular day particular time a day for a heart transplant lung transplant liver transplant vital organs which meant that on that date somebody with maxim blood type and a tissue
tissue sighs and so on was going to be killed their organs and so that first of all indicated it couldn't be only coming for prisoners sentenced to death and second in case there was a large organ donor pool that was just sitting around waiting waiting to be killed everywhere else in the world people wait for donors or good people in need
transplants wait for donors but in china's the other way the sources are waiting for the patients to arrive we could see as we did our work that i mean not only it's a lot of transplants but the capacity kept on increasing new wings of hospitals new hospitals were constantly being built a he we can see priceless with her eventually
taken down but we could also see that the hospitals were saying that the switzer major source of funding that selling transplants became a multi-billion dollar business in china now i david cover and i had had focused on the calendar particular because that's how we got started and and that was we try to kind of narrow inquiry as
much as possible but what ethan gutmann did who's a journalist to interview us and ended his own work is kind of expanded the inquiry to see who else was being victimized this way and he identified the wiegers the tibetans and eastern lightning house christians much smaller numbers the rigors into betances regional as well but these groups were
also being victimized also being blood tested organ examined the we actually have a whistleblower with your doctor and bertoni who's talked a lot about what he was doing at the time it looked like the evolution of the practice it started with prisoners sentenced to death that's the way china got into the business of organ transplantation it
then expanded to weekers and leaders were the first prisoners of conscience where victims really got into big big volumes of with fallon gong and and then spread also 222 tibetans and eastern lightning house christians now as i said we had a number of every century tales that led us to the conclusion to which we came
but one of them was the fact that whatever question should be in place to prevent this abuse from happening was not in place neither outside of china nor inside china india china had a law that said that you could source organs for prisoners without their consent or without end without the consent of their families in 1984 law which still sits on
the books but other countries typically would say in their laws you can't kill people for their organs and you can't buy and sell organs but it was only a territorial and scope and in it didn't apply if you left the country and were complicit in killing somebody abroad for their organs are and and so it's generally true that if if a crime is
punished from free it's it's a lot easier for happen for it to happen it's a much more likely to happen and and so that was one of the reasons we came to the conclusion we did now we came up with this report in 2006 we did a second version 2007 we did a version of book form in 2009 all under the title bloody harvest the there was an ngo started
after work came out called doctors against forced organ harvesting started by torsten trade and the uh and it he's a german doctor operating the united states and he and i co-authored a book on this issue called state organs which is a collection of essays and and contributors are mostly transplant professional sir around the world the uh
after that ethan gutmann was a journalist to interview interview david kilgour me he did his own work on the subject the slaughter which as i said expanded the scope and basically did its work independently but came to the same conclusion david took her and i did and then the three of us government killer and i did this update where we looked at
volumes now i and david kilgour there are human rights activists and advocates is as well as researchers and writers the david gilbert was a member of parliament for 27 years and a member of the canadian government cabinet minister for 47 years and so what we have both been trying to do and and since ethan gutmann
2014 not his work he's been joining us is not only talking about what we found but trying to combat the abuse is best we can and so one of the things we've been trying to do is try to advocate for tea policies and laws that would prohibit the sort of abuse and there have been developments in the past 10 years in this issue i mean when we
started there was nothing but now there's the united nations world health organization guiding principles on transplantation there's a constant your tree on organ trafficking which has been negotiating is open from signature hasn't come in the divorce yet a number of states have a band a a transit transplant tourism israel spain taiwan
spain wasn't originally much of a problem but israel and and taiwan were i mean in israel virtually everybody was going to china for transplants because the israeli health system wasn't was paying the holeshot i mean they were just paying for the drugs before the drugs afterwards they were paying the chinese hospital costs through the
health system so that that was stopped and start to legislation and taiwan because the proximity and language and culture is there was a tremendous longer traffic into there and they uh and but there was also course the number of falun gong practitioners who who are quite horrified by what this was happening there was a kind of push back
and forth but just recently taiwan abolish this practice there's other countries that have had some tentative steps towards dealing with it but nothing is comprehensive in these other countries and so i thought what i do for the rest of time i i'm talking here's is talk about what a little bit about what australia has done and a lot more about
what australia could do to try to combat this abuse now obviously when you're dealing with human rights violations in china it's it's it's difficult for australia indeed anybody outside try to impact on it i mean a lot of this has to do with internal power politics the struggle between different factions are i mean
about part of the reason that falun gong has been victimized it's been not its victimization has been an instrument realization of the power struggle between different factions and and so it's difficult for outsiders to impact on that but at least as outsiders we can say we know about it we protested and we can show solidarity with the victims but
what outsiders can do and and do unequivocally and completely and clearly is avoid any complicity in that abuse there's no reason why outside should be part of that abuse and slotted that can be done to stop it so let me go through some of the things that can be done one is making the criminal law about organ trafficking or
extracting or organs without consent purchasing and selling of organs brokerage of organs advertising of organs promotion of sale of organs making all that illegal not only territorially but extraterritorial now if you look at the strong criminal code if you buy and sell an organ within australia if you kill somebody in
australia for their organs without their consent i you are committing a crime and you will be prosecuted for however if you leave australia and you engage in the same activities in china you won't be prosecuted in china and you won't be prosecuted here and that's a that's a problem
now the different countries that have attempted to deal with this as i said it israel italy and spain and taiwan have there been other countries where there's been initiatives taken it but haven't let to actual legislation that's been private member's bills in canada has been a few of them in belgium in france in italy and so there's kind of a
developing awareness of the need for this sort of legislation there's actually private member's bill here in australia is well a sponsored by david shoebridge new south wales legislature a green party it's has a support within the new software legislature it finished second reading it went into it finished first training went into second reading
debate november tenth which is a 30 days ago and it's it looks like it's gonna eventually be passed what it does is it penalizes the somebody who's in ordinarily resident in new south wales which i think i mean now the uh from leaving is that person leaves that leaves the state and leaves the country
and participate in these abuses outside of australia announced a lot side of new south wales not soluble show they can be prosecuted for participation and and that's that's certainly a positive step it's a start but obviously it needs to be enacted a through-and-through out a australia so that's one possible remedy that could develop another is a civil
liability now civil liability is more awkward because ii you need both a perpetrator and victim a the jurisdiction but very often what happens with some meaning civil liability meeting you're suing someone in for compensation on your and because they it's they committed wrong yet and if you win it's it's not a finding of
criminal liability the person doesn't go to jail they just have to pay money standard of proof is different its sponsor probabilities instead of reasonable doubt very often those civil lawsuits well first of all you need a mean that the victims are all dead so the the plaintiffs would be family members of this writing founding members
the perpetrators often they hide behind the doctrine of state immunity or sovereign immunity because they're they're doing something in an official function and and you need some sort of a law that gives some type of relaxation to the concept of sovereign immunity when you're dealing with this type of abuse
now generally its international law says you're supposed to give sovereign immunity to states and and you're supposed to give sovereign immunity to state officials performance state functions because obviously states perform for individuals they don't perform in another way but there are exceptions that international law that
allow you to pursue a person individually performing a function of a state where it's a violation of a basic law of international at the basic rule of international law in latin it's called you scoggins uh the technical phrase peremptory norms of international law when it there's all sorts of violations you can allow for civil
liability of the united states has that kind of exception of for torture and it says that you can sue a torture even and torture rocking state capacity which indeed tortures have to do to be four to be torture the you can sue them a in the united states if it's the there from a designated nation and so something like that could be enacted
under australian i think that would be helpful a third type of remedy which i think should exist and it doesn't exist is compulsory reporting and registration of transplant tourism right now uh there is none we have some anecdotal information i was listening to a senate estimates and there was an exchange between of the
australian parliament notice the change between department of foreign affairs gregory fletcher and a couple of senators senator rice and senator abetz asking about this issue and one of them it mentions department of health put out statistics that 53 people have gone from australia china between 2010 in 2014 for transplant so they're mean there's some
travel there there is some information about it but we don't have comprehensive data about it now again this is something that the legislation that david shoebridge has proposed has specifically addressed a and he in the bill he's proposed has said that there has to be a registry created by the new south wales ministry of health that
health professionals after a report to the registry whenever they have reasonable grounds to believe that has been a transplantation under a commercial arrangement or without consent the right now i mean if i were drafting legislation i don't know i we do it quite that way because it requires some sort of judgment about whether
they're reasonable grounds and i think it would be a lot simpler if they just have to report everything where there is a transplant tourism and let the authorities decide but anyhow the that's that's the bill he's proposed and uh and the report is supposed to include the name of the patient when and where the medical practitioner north provided
services to the patient the grounds for suspecting the tissues and transplanted into the patient and and also puts an obligation on patients to report as well the it is the date location and nature the treatment now when you get a transplant you need medical care afterwards uh the you need anti-rejection drugs afterwards so that
you do come in contact with the health system after you've got the transplant health system will know about a this transplantation but as i say i mean typically right now all that happens it's anecdotal information a doctor has a patient in need to transplant the patient disappears comes back a few weeks later and says okay i've got a
transplant and give me some anti-rejection drugs and that's how they find out about it and you can you can accumulate some information about this but a by talking to doctors and hospitals but it's it's far from systemic right now another a legal change i would propose is having something in immigration law that deals
with this uh that actually prohibits entry two people have been complicit in organ transplant abuse the united states actually in there if you apply for visitors visa in the united states they will ask you that question have you been complicit in organ transplant abuser those aren't exact words but was to those effect now obviously you have to
be pretty addle-minded to say yes to that question but i the but what it does is it sets up a remedy that wouldn't otherwise be available because what immigration law says is that if you foreclose the line of inquiry you can be denied entry or removed simply because of that foreclosure no matter where that line of inquiry would have gone if it
had been completed so the if you say no i didn't participate in organ transplant abuse but you hide in some way your involvement in organ transplantation then they can deport you simply because you hit that without actually showing that you're involved in order to transport of you so i think that's something that could usually be
done another thing i i think that the australian system and indeed all systems have to look at is is a state funding for a foreign transplants i mean this this was a big change in israel because they were finding everything and now they found nothing and and i i don't think it was just the funding that's
stop the flow of israelis to china because obviously they could still pick by themselves but it was also their realization of what's happening in their horrid participating it but there should be something that says we're not going to find this now i mean i am a lawyer but i i'm a canadian or so i'm sort of grappling with the australian system but
as far as i can see what happens is australia doesn't actually pay for transplants a bond broad but what they do pay for is medication for people who are going to brought and people are coming back from abroad the i was looking at the australian pharmaceutical benefits scheme and and that allows the students to take medicines out of
australia that are further personal use and and then when they come back and they can get these and and rejection drugs also under the pharmaceutical benefits scheme now the canadian society transplantation and canadian society of nephrology have looked at this issue about medications abroad and taking medications abroad and what they sn is
that physicians should not prescribe medications or otherwise facilitate obtaining medications which will be used during the transplantation of a purchase order i endorse that recommendation not just because i'm canadian i think it it makes sense and i think the australian pharmaceutical benefits scheme should include that provision that's
about going out but there's also the issue of coming back now malaysia has said that they will not find anti-rejection drugs so i mean they will provide for people who got in the two countries where there's transplant abuse and and then come back and i mean a lot of this is talking about china without saying china and the their
theory as well these people who go to china for transplants are paying huge thumbs uh they've obviously got the money and and why should the taxpayer pay for this sort of abuse this sort of a recommendation about not paying for anti-rejection drugs i would say is a bit controversial because some of the people in the medical profession say
well you can't mean people may want to spend their last dollar on the transplantation in china and so that you can't really cut them off and rejection drugs which be it would be fatal to them but any help that's something i certainly worth looking at yet another issue which has come up in australia is the training of
o of chinese transplant professionals it and i mean that there's nothing wrong with our obviously with the training people simply because they come from china but there has to be some assurance that they're not gonna use their training in order to participate in organ transplant abuse and this is something that queensland his grappled
with uh and and there's something on the public record about that uh the uh it wants you to queensland parliament uh that there was a petition to the minister of health asking for an investigation of forced organ harvesting from fallon gone uh and the minister of health the road back in response that prince charles
hospital has a policy of not training any chinese surgeon in any transplant surgical technique and and that was his response in parliament in the in the in the legislation and in line now that hospital is one of the major transplant hospital queensland and other hospitals in our australia so i've been told if followed a similar policy
without issuing a similar statement what what i've heard from other hospitals is the they're not as they're not so categories say no chinese but they expect the anybody who's coming there to sign some sort of pledge that they're not going to use the training to participate in organ transplant abuse and its kind of dried-up applicants from
china the there's an article that was written by number transplant doctors down of its shapiro olivia in a professional journal in 2011 which states that training chinese transplant professionals by the international community must be conditioned on commitments that trainees will not engage directly or indirectly in east of
organs from executed prisoners now that is a a policy which as far as i can tell uh australia is following on an informal basis but i are like i think it should be formalized now it's a book of what i want to say for the rest of the time i have is the deal specifically with medical ethics i mean so far i've been talking a lot about the law but for the
rest are i want to talk about ethics now izzy the national health and medical research council of australian april is here came up with a very set of detailed ethical guidelines for organ transplantation from deceased donors it goes on for pages but it doesn't deal with transplant tourism they refer to it in the bibliography but if you actually
look at the text they don't mention it they do have a statement in there saying it is unethical and unlawful to purchase offer offer to purchase or sell organs for transplantation but that of course could be done theoretically within australia or shouldn't be done within australia there's nothing that's directs the reader to what happens how to deal
with a transplant tourism and and there are a number of different issues a that arises that are very specific which are i think have to be addressed once we get into a transplant tourism that have not been a addressed within australian context and they have been a addressed a in other instances in other
jurisdictions and so let me go through some of the principles that should be stated as likely to deal with this specific issue of one of them is simply there should be a policy a policy that deals specifically with transplant tourism and i mean it's good that dave i i mean it's kind of unfortunate took them to april 2 2016 to develop
something like uh about ethical statements on on transplantation but i think they need to get into more detail specifically about transplant tourism and so i think one at one of this is the statement should be at the pieces to start off with no complicity a weight with transplant tourism i i think that should be a guiding principle now what
i've done in the written text is i've gone through some of the a lot of the international standards because the i mentioned the world health organization's develop standards the transplantation societies develop standards are about dealing with chinese transplant professionals and also about the issue of sourcing organs from
prisoners the world metra medical or world medical association has developed principles in a number of countries have done so as well hong kong which i suppose is not attempt country but they have developed some very specific principles which actually were the earliest of the mall which i i found kind of interesting because i
suspect they knew more about china earlier than anybody else did there was a group of transplant professionals that developed this istanbul declaration had an in meeting in istanbul they developed a number of principles and is canadian society of transplantation apologies i mentioned has developed principles and and a
without articulating principles that are i can just develop on my own i could certainly think that some if you just look at these standard international generally accepted professional sources you can develop a number of principles which are seen a number of principles which i think should be incorporated into australia standards
one of them is a couple of shirts are dealing specifically with tourism of it basically condemning transplant tourism now there is of course a difference between crossing the border to get a transplant and transplant tourism because transplant tourism involves commercialism involves exploitation and it and it's not just the same as getting
a transplant international one of the principles they actually developed in taiwan is don't go abroad with the patient for organ transplantation and receive compensation i mean that seems might seem pretty obvious except that was happening and and indeed i do i can't say how much of a problem this is in australia but in many countries this
is a problem that it's not just the chinese doctors and hospitals that are benefiting from the money be that's being spent on transplant tourism is also the local doctors as well and and they become a constituency that kind of are pushing the back back against trying to end this transplant tourism and so something has to be done to deal with
that particular problem and and i think that that's one of the principles a second one is doctors shouldn't be referring patients to transplantation a outside of the country uh if without first ascertaining the status of the donor and when they're ascertaining the status the donor what they should be using is the standard of reasonable
doubt as long as there's any reasonable doubt that the sourcing of organs proper it there shouldn't be any referral and it one of the problems i see in this field is a lot of willful blindness people say well i don't know what i was told it was a prisoner sentenced to death arrives told it was a donor and they don't
really look into the issue and investigated very thoroughly and and they should they should be satisfied as i say without doubt before they refer anyone now it was sort of the basic medical principles within the hippocratic oath is do no harm that principal doesn't just apply to the doctors on patient it applies of course
the donor as well and and if you're anyway complicit in in the victimization of a the source the fact that you're helping your patient is no excuse and so that principle has to be respected in relation to the sources well as the doctors are on patient the is so that thursday a doctor should also not be forming a brokerage function they
shouldn't be intermediaries between the patients and transplant patient hospitals about abroad they should also be looking at the local law so the countries to which the referring at the local heart does not prohibit the sale of organs uh the information service awards it's not transparent those gross violations of human rights violations
and absence the rule of law or there's a known violations of medical ethics then there should simply be no referrals and i i mean of course i like all those principles but i i think it's worthwhile noting particular though is the statement about gross human rights violations absence the rule of law because of course what you get in china
is a lot of statements from transplant professionals they're saying we changed our system and everything is fine now they periodically say this in response to public criticism and i mean my own view is that those statements are not trustworthy partly because there's a lot of hard data which suggests it's not so but also partly because it's unrealistic
to expect an island of respect for the rule of law in the transplantation field in china raging sea of tyranny and abuse of human right and you can't really expect and unless somebody who violates chinese law institutionally anything hospitals and health system is going to is it must these people can be prosecuted for
violation of rule of law for violations of the law then the system is suspect and of course in china you got a system that doesn't allow for prosecution of the communist party i mean a party runs the state it's not the state and the courts that decide what the party can do so it's really impossible in that context to have an ethical
transplantation system there are principles about advertising and brokerage uh now a advertising is through the internet is a big problem i mean you can just go to the internet today so i want to buy in i in organ from china and lots of stuff will pop up the and and brokerages the problem uh i know in canada we have a
broker's advertising stuff hey how'd it go wandering the hospitals and try to elicit the traffic or commerce from patients at into china the hospitals in china they run websites of the most recent one that i saw was omar healthcare the and i pointed it out to the transplantation society year to go and and at the time they wrote to the
president china she him paying an open letter about armor healthcare and it disappeared mean there's a lot of kind of cover-up or a cannon and denial and obfuscation but there's still a lot of this brokerage going on and and i think one of the necessities for legislation is is is to prevent a yet another standard we need is a accountability and
oversight we needed in every country and we needed by independent outside transparent mechanisms and one of the problems we face in china of course is like transparency the i mean it shouldn't be as i said we did an update in june of this year about transplantation volumes now that update was 7680 pages 2400
footnotes to come to the conclusion that they're doing between 60 and hundred thousand transplants here it shouldn't be that hard there they should be able to tell us that i mean they will tell you something but it's completely unverifiable and there needs to be mechanisms in place to make and of course as as i said the
problem isn't just china australia because we don't know how many people are going to china for transplants and and and we should be able to get that in information there also needs to be a lot more in terms of patient counseling and and they certainly should be something in terms of patient counseling in the ethical guidelines which i mean because
the current ethical guidelines they don't deal with transplant tourism they certainly don't deal with patient counseling about transplant tourism uh and and so uh what should happen is that patients should be told about a 80 the dangers and also the ethical concerns about transplant it turns them into these countries the now one of the
things we found out when as i said there's been a lot of cover-up in china and its kind of progressive cover-up i mean the more information we find the more it disappears and one of the things that was happening before we did our report was that doctors in china when needed a transplant with the transponders they would give the
transponders a letter saying this is the pre-operation medication we use this is the post medication are post-operation medication we used this is the transplantation we did this to see it's the behavior or the post-operative treatment we recommend after a report came out all those letters disappeared a and what happens now if you're going to
china for transplant you just come back you talk to your doctor and you try to tell your doctor's best you can what you could i understood happen from your only knowledge of it and that obviously makes medical treatment a lot more difficult and and so one of the standards is the patient should be advised that this is going to happen and that they uh that
they're gonna come back and post treatment is going to be very difficult because the doctors are gonna be able to know exactly what happened while while they were there but there's also a lot of i mean in any operation it could be postoperative complications uh but it becomes a lot more difficult where when patients are just discharged quickly
where the doctors don't really care whether just doing it for money and and and there's not no real information about uh what happened now it's the of so that some of it now also i would suggest that patients should be cancelled that is to go abroad to china's somebody an innocent the prisoner of conscience may well be
killed for their organs are z they may not i mean i'd like to think everybody's reading what i wrote but i'm not realistic enough to know that that's not the case and i and so i think patients really have to be told what research is showing about what's going on in china the and and people should be told that no matter what they remember they're not
going to be a the doctors abroad aren't going to be able to verify that information if a patient says well i went to this hospital they remember the name the hospital they're not only told the names the doctors but let's say they found out the name of the doctor dez and and the the foreign doctor the australian doctor goes back to that
house phone says what happened what should i do what should be the follow-up they won't answer you so the patient should be told that i so these are some of the things that patients should be counseled about they should be told that the transplant tourism industry relies on secrecy and and it's going to be very difficult for
foreign treating patients to a foreign treating doctor be able to pierce through that secrecy the but there are are also issues about what the doctor should be doing beforehand a like what what what the canadian doctors have talked about is don't give these people medical records if somebody says i'm gonna go to transplant trying to give me
the medical records so i can do that the the canadian standards say no don't don't prescribe medication for somebody who's going a abroad for transplantation to a country like china also when somebody comes back they say and again this is controversial by what they say is you have a right not to treat that patient you've gotta you you can ii you
have to find alternate care if you're not going to treat that patient you can't just leave it is a patient without any treatment but uh as long as you can arrange alternate care for that patient you have a right to say no and you and you can even and you should be telling the patient before the patient leaves that that this is what you intend to do
there's also standards which have been developed about research and collaboration which i i should be adopted into australian ethical standards which is basically don't do it don't do research with people who have been in participating in organ transplant abuse your insourcing origins from questionable sources don't
published articles with them don't allow them to speak to conferences a the don't go visit them and speak at their conferences that and i wouldn't in relation to the abuse and trying to say have a complete boycott of everything in china but i think there should be a very specific boy part of of this industry and its activity is unless and until
they developed transparency and ethical standards that the research shouldn't be using the data that's generated in china one of the issues that arise that has arisen in some countries i don't know if it's an issue here is the participation of anti-rejection drug trials in china the reason why i'm not sure if it's written here because i'm not sure that
they're pharmaceutical companies here that have ever been doing that but i know it's a big problem in switzerland it was a small problem in canada a.d the multinational pharmaceutical companies basically start doing that participating and reduction drug trials in china but it is certainly uh i mean in case it does arise here it did
there should be something away for a policy stating in so in how those are kind of a run through some of the basic principles ethical principles you can find in the standards that are relevant relevant already been developed internationally but have not been incorporated into a australian ethical standards
i think that's more or less what i'm going to say now i'll just say by way of conclusion that it there's lots that could be done that hasn't been done it shouldn't be controversial because many of this stuff has been developed elsewhere it's been adopted elsewhere by international bodies what i see is and i i spent actually the
last three days and can bribes in camera this morning also money to see talking to parliamentarians there doesn't seem to be any real opposition to any of these concepts and also within the transplantation profession i haven't met anybody here at this time but over the years i've met many people in the transplantation
profession and on the whole i would say i mean in fact there's been some real leaders the international transplantation profession from within australia and and and some of these international prayer principles have been developed with the endorsement and cooperation and approval of these transitions from australia so i i don't
imagine it'd be a lot of a real opposition to the incorporation of these these laws and ethical standards in australia but the reality is they're not there and their absence it makes a difference in their presence would make a difference so as i say i think i'll stop there thank you very much and i'm happy to answer your questions
thank you david you've certainly given us a lot to think about we've got some time for questions and we've got a microphone yeah we have a microphone so please indicate if you'd like to ask a question david happy to answer questions the gentleman at the back and one in the middle
david matters on i'm a physician and i must say your talk was a real eye-opener to me but i want about other countries besides china you know i i look after patients with chronic pain problems who've often sought once i see a poor patients incidentally in the public system and of course they can't afford to get things like hip replacement or
knee replacements and it's not uncommon to hear stories of people who gon say to india or some other country to have a prosthetic joint replaced and i wouldn't be surprised i probably am pleased certain that the same sort of things are going on in some other countries besides china in the way you described is that so well i would say in answer that yes
no i mean there is organ transplant abuse in other countries india and pakistan philippines in and number of poor countries but the the abuse and other countries is a form of black-market it's not a state-run state organized in china it's it's different cuz its institutionalized it's part of the five-year plan it's it's part of a
party system the people the sources are coming from the state prisons they're not being picked up off the street in in other countries it is for people selling stuff and they're not till being killed for it they survived but they're just words they have two kidneys and lose one and so it hurts their house but they
survived the operation on and so it's it's a different phenomenon but i would also say i mean all the standards i've been articulating a well i shouldn't say all but most of them are generic in nature of the the when you're talking about extraterritorial law it's anything that's outside of australia no matter where it doesn't say china are and it
would apply to all these other countries as well i have in terms of the abuse focused on china within china focused on falun gong party because i've only got so much time and i'm trying to do many other things besides but i i know for well that you know i haven't researched and written on a 904 well there's abuse in other countries and and and is this
generic sort of law would help to end transplant tourism of that sort as well thank you david first of all i'd like to commend you for a decade longer endeavors in his field is really appreciate it and i'm also pleased to see that there wasn't too much resistance from members of parliament in camera however you know in in a country
where the lobbyists of the chinese government walkout corridors of parliament freely i like to know what individual other countries have had what movements have occurred that have brought about these laws or the strengthening of the laws organized around canada thank you well it in in canada we don't have a
change in the law there's been some private member's bill their proposed it but it hasn't been adopted by the government i mentioned some principles by the canadian society of transplantation and theology which obviously have a lot less interaction with chinese government and then business people were the government
of canada would do so they're less concerned about what the government china has to say and what they're proposing is is just as with the the ministry of health here they're just proposing guidelines are and a buddy israel is a different matter because israel they actually did change the law and the well first of this couple things
i would say uh i mean it's a lot more difficult to get something that specific about china of course because of that concern and so one of the things i was talking about with parliamentarians was emotion on china or resolution on china or a parliamentary inquiry on china that might be more difficult the problem isn't even necessarily apartment errands
but the department of foreign affairs i met with department for the stairs and and there were as hostile as the parliamentarians were friendly i mean there are their attitude was that this isn't happening i and i'm making it all up i mean that was sort of that their approach to it which of course is the chinese
government's approach as well and it's the uh there was a it's somebody he's not in australia anymore but there was an economist are i met elliot fam who used to teach at the australian national university in canberra he's using it was a taiwanese me since got back to taiwan but mistaken those dates i was talking but well but in any other way he did
this research comparing criticism of human rights violations china coming out of different countries and trade with china he found no correlation that countries would increase their criticism and also increase their trade and i mean you can see that in a very practical way that i mean know that the chinese are you angry defended in the walk out of
the room if you start talking about human rights violations of falun gong but they don't stop business because they benefit from it is as much as the foreigners do and and the distance people themselves tend not to be very political i mean they're they're just going about their business ways but the stuff that's generic i mean the chinese
don't even care because as far as they're concerned when you say stop transfer australia's going abroad to participate transplant abuse their attitude is well that doesn't mean not so are they don't even really care i and so when it comes to the generic stuff iii don't really think you are going to get me a pushback from china and and
it's a lot easier to do hi i'm mike phelan honor greens member and i'm very much aware of david shoebridge is legislation in the state parliament is a greens mlc on i'm really interested in how we can progress at the australian government level and obviously the crossbenchers don't have the numbers and and it's going to take a
lot more to get good legislation at the federal level then just the opposition so i'm wondering if you can give us some ideas how we might get to progress that this campaign at the federal level are obviously letter writing and there's other other methods but we need to get a lot of coalition people inside too so i'm wondering if you have some ideas as
to who's been interested in the issue and how we might get plus some pressure given we have a very strong trade relationship with china and i'm sure that's one of the the issues that stands in the way of getting decent laws against open transparent transplant well i mean i could tell you if i went through my files so i met with the last
few days and everybody i talked to was was friendly but the it it's hard to say who's actually within the uh commonwealth klaus is gonna sort of take up the file after i leave i mean one bit of advice i would give is i think it's been a lot of concentration on julie bishop and ministry of foreign affairs the department of foreign affairs
interaction with china which does generate all this pushback from the department which basically wants to maintain good relations with china and whether it's real or not thinks it may impact on economic interest i think strategically it might make more sense or equal sense to talk with the department of health because a lot of
the health policy like these guidelines of medical ethics they come on a out of the department of healthy the prescription drugs policy comes out of the department of health and i the whole medicare system consider the department of health and they're not addressing transplant tourism uh i i also think you can you can find allies within the well
certainly the bioethics professional uh the it the and also within the transplant profession again when you're talking generically i i mean when it comes to china they're even within transplant profession some of them have issues as i indicated previously because they've had prior contacts or they made it may be some way involved but on a
general level there are fine and in terms of these principles but maybe actually do you have something to say about that like in terms of what the bioethicists could do about all this for huh that's putting us on the spot i think the bioethicists have been slow to take this up as a cause
partly i think because of lack of knowledge which isn't necessarily excusable but certainly my only asset protection was executed prisoners were criminals who have been convicted and sentenced and the the issue there was the death penalty rather when necessarily what happened after they died and that certainly that
something up learned a lot more about in the last 12 months i think the bioethics committee is starting to get interested in you and i both speaking at the buyer bioethics conference in melbourne this week later in the week so hopefully we'll get some audience there and people have been attending events in sydney but it it slow i think i've got an idea for
an open letter about journal editors and what their responsibilities should be and i really like the idea of a sort of a code of ethics about transplant tourism in a very very short of practical level like you suggested write another group that sorry because you but i another group i could suggest is the nurses because over the years i've gone
to many different events in a australia at one point i spoke to a transplant nurses conference in australia i mean there is such a group and they weren't aware and they were interested in they do meet and and and they could be a useful point of contact and pressure as well and hello melanie and i'm an english
language teacher and i teach there for her foreign students a number of whom are prospective nursing students i teach them enough english that they can carry on and do nursing in this country i'm just waiting for this to blow up in my face in class but that's not the question i wanted to ask it's quite a technical one and and you you said that
one of the canadian ethical standards was that a doctor need not treat a returning patient but should provide alternative care what might alternative care be and by the way thank you very much i didn't know anything about this six months ago i'm horrified and i'm very grateful for what you've told us tonight
well presumably you would just be a another doctor who would follow up with the patient provided prescriptions for anti-rejection drugs in provide the same sort of care that the declining doctor would provide i mean if this is one of the facets of transplantation that it does require is continuing carrie you never well it's it as i understand the
transplantation you never walk away from it completely and so it it it represents an opportunity to deal with the issue in a way and in the in right now i mean we do have of course doctors that are warning beforehand or right after but they're really left to their own devices and i think we need just more an institutional framework to help them
deal with this problem that they see individually thank you up in that question about a doctor to put is the poster range alternative care for a patient i filed to see the effect of that if he's providing alternative equal k it's just a protocol is it not thank you a not completely because
doctors while patients develop relationships with doctors and patients rightly or wrongly think some doctors are better than others and uh and very often more think they're doctors better than anybody else and that's why they go to that doctor uh and so the the threat of the i mean the thread of the loss that carried it may be a threat of at
least in the patient's mind of a loss of better care for lester care and also it brings home to the patient the seriousness with which the doctor views with the patient is doing so i i think it has a kind of a warning effect of the patient islam well people are still thinking oh thank you very much for your very
informative talk and i'm going to grab deviate a little bit from the medical and questions that have been coming up and just sitting here wondering you know why is song considered such a dangerous practice and why is it and why is it being forbidden i mean you know why not tai chi and many people practice tai chi's so what is it
about falun gong and that makes it so reprehensible thank you well i mean there's a number of different ways of answering that i mean one of them is just looking at what the party said that the when fong was banned it was very popular i mean it wasn't just popular in the sense there was everywhere but it was also up and
down in terms of hierarchy the party and and there's lots of people in the party that were practicing it and as a result when the initial impression started there's a lot of leaks and you can actually read in bloody harvest the the our own work the a memorandum that jesse men who is president of china and secretary communist party time sent to
the central committee of the communist party about wife ellen going should be banned c-can you can see the justification in his own words are and if you read that memorandum you can see that it says well uh is that they got is that they're not communists they don't believe in communism they're not a atheist there is their spiritual they
have a mobilization capacity i mean the party was unfamiliar with a crowdsourcing and the internet and cell phones this was the nineties after all and and and then these crowd started appearing and and they didn't want to make about it make of it and and that got them are very concerned in the there was a little
some personal jealousy and gentlemen's part because lee honggi was what he was reading writing and speaking was getting a lot more followership then with jesse men was saying and writing a the gentleman had written some sort of update of communism called the three represents what wikipedia which is supposed to be neutral calls
incomprehensible i the and it was and so there was a bit of that i mean so that's one way of looking at it oh just what they said another way of looking at it is analytically what was going on the i mean you did have a good there was a debate within the party i mean before was officially banned the central committee uh bye
jackson and gone and that group there was lower levels that were debating you know what do we do about this phenomenon because all over china public in and not communists uh it's good or it's bad that there were some critical articles that were written about fallun gong which generated some protests and then these protests the crowds that they generated
started there are arising concerns there is a a critical article published in a journal in tension and there was a demonstration changing about the article and people intention said go to beijing to petition and so they a group went to beijing to petition and a group that went to beijing competition was the largest group that it showed up in
invasion since gentlemen square massacre and so that kind of alarm some people in a party just in this large group appearing out of nowhere and they didn't know about it beforehand they also had some kind of mirror imaging i mean the following is a set of exercises but the the party at least some people thought of it as an organization as opposed to
just a set of our exercises which isn't a but they said you know what is its organization and who's the mastermind a meeting because there's no organization is no mastermind but the they had this kind of mirror imaging like it must be a communist party but a non-communist party and and so there was that going on you also look at a as they say there's a
this is perpetual power struggles in the congress party i mean i mean his struggle for power everywhere but in australia settles through elections in in chinese it's settled in other ways a and the what i mean even today there's still a chance to manufacture initiation pinga faction i mean before gentlemen there is a before she's being there
other factions opposing she's jumping and in a other factions opposing the yankee min what is eamon did with the establishment of the persecution of falun gong is he didn't just get the party to repress it he set up a whole institutional bureaucracy to repressive call the 610 office which wasn't one office it was everywhere was in every
police station every business they had their own 610 office called 610 because june tenth of 1999 was the date the party decided to repressive and uh and it became kind of an alternate power structure that was beholden to genki min so it was a way of his is developing a control of the system are maintaining control system after she has to be
president and that's why i referred earlier to the persecution of falun gong to a certain extent and instrumentalization i mean that it wasn't necessarily being persecuted as an end in itself but it means by which the jersey min faction could maintain control through this informal power structure within the party of 16 offices
not just it's not a state office it's a party office but it it's a way of his maintaining a control of the system also i mean if you look at communism generally i mean how do they justify their hold on power when they're not elected they can't say the people want us because there's no i mean several elections they be defeated and so
typically what they do is they manufacture enemies now the and say we are fighting this enemy now the traditional enemy of communism had been capitalism the bourgeois landlords what happened and then it became capitalist so they have to find another enemy and the az is the advantage of felony long was it everywhere
uh it's large i mean you could see it and so it again another form instrumentalization the of but as you move forward to it becomes yet another reason because although all these the the slanders that the manufacturer part falun gong were generated afterwards uh people just within china because the
constant propaganda came to believe in this stuff about evil culture they eat your children are there vampires or whatever uh it outsiders would find them do find it ridiculous but if you're a particular leave here we get within the state your state functionary your prison guard whatever they just came to see this as
true it became for the people within the system the reason for the victimization i am i mean it's easy enough for us as outsiders just to see and say that devin are benign and they're harmless but people who are constantly a propagandized by this vilification eventually buy into it and that's i think what's continued and and and made
worse the prosecution on christian thank you very much for the talk today i think we all agree that many people are not aware of what's happening there is a lack of information lack of knowledge i just wonder if media can be involved at all just to let people know basically what is happening and encourage them to
take a stand because i believe we all have a duty as individuals where there are people that can't defend themselves and we've been what we've seen what happened in the second world war when so many people were desecrated and we don't want history to repeat so maybe just making it really out there in everyone's face would help
yes most certainly are and i mean i wouldn't say necessarily do it for this reason but i i think once there are attempts to change the system within australia easier to the largest ethical the media will become more engaged because i mean what the media are always looking for something new and if the system in australia is changing then the
media can report those changes that's one way bring awareness to the issue i thank you my name is newton shoe i mean the legal profession thank you mr. mathers for champion mean this particular cause are my question is that in australia the two major party has been somewhat muted in their response but behind closed doors
i guess what will have the made the politicians from those two major parties have been saying to you and down whether or not there would be any concrete legislative changes in the short term future well as i said i haven't really come up i mean the only real opposition i got came from the department of foreign
affairs which is presumably would be reflected in anything that specifically critical of china and the government may find that difficult to but when it comes to something as generic i haven't seen it or heard any real opposition there was an interesting i mean of course behind closed doors first of all i'm not sure i should be
telling you what was told to me behind closed doors i mean i can tell you what i said behind closed doors but i can't really tell you i shouldn't be telling you what other people said the line closed doors uh secondly uh i mean what's important is what they do not want to say to me i the and but there have been some public
statements that have been some interest uh i refer to the senate estimates in terms of figure 53 but well what happened was this department of foreign affairs and gregory fletcher were being questioned about foreign policy generally and there's a couple of exchanges a questions asked by senator direction of greens and senator abetz
usha not only for the liberal democrats but i gather from the right wing liberal democrats and both of them were very hard on on graham fletcher uh about on this issue and and and there are a complete opposite ends the entire ideological spectrum so and i think that in microcosm represents the kind of
consensus that's developed around this issue that the well i mean a bet was more concerned about the source of organs from christians uh in in china a it then feeling i mean he's focusing on christians but that's okay i mean it's a private a problem for christians as well so and-and-and-and-and government has focused in on that and he's got some
good evidence about that and of course it's a problem with the muslims with the weakness is a problem with the buddhist with the buttons i mean it'sit's not although it's primarily from gone it's not only for long and and and i think the people gotten to the issue have realized this and and so i my sense of you know where the politicians are
coming from is they agree i think to a certain extent were caught in a vicious circle here because because there's no compulsory reporting we don't know the volumes we did we don't know how big a problem it is because we don't know how big a problem it is there's a tendency to say well maybe it's not really big problem and i i think we're i mean one
of the ways you're you're talking about the media i think one of the things that happened in israel that motivated the changes this one doctor who had this patient who said i am going in a couple months on this state this time to get a heart transplant and he said how this is possible and uh and then he read our report me and he realized how it was
possible and then he started a campaign i mean it was as it turned out head of the transplantation society visual started campaign to get the law changed it was changed and i mean there's doctors like that in australia who have patients who go to china on fixed dates and get transplants and so on and i i think it's
just more of those stories that come out to be more of a kind of awareness that need to do something and i mean i mean to it to a certain extent you're knocking on an open-door the questions parliamentary time the question is priorities rather than willingness but i i think the more that people do to make it an issue in australia there the more
it becomes a priority and more likely people are to do something thank you very much like to join me in thanking david 44 talking for your questions and his very logical answers i thank you very much thank you all for coming out tonight i'm sorry that if many of you got stuck in the traffickers as that david in fact getting here
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