עו"ד דיוויד מטאס: קצירת האיברים בכפייה המתרחשת בסין מתפשטת כיום גם למדינות אחרות

We'll hear from an international human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize nominee who has uncovered mass atrocities. David Matis has exposed trafficking and exploitation globally, including China's state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting. This interview is part of the International Heroes Wanted campaign. It honors courageous leaders, survivors, and organizations working to prevent and end human trafficking. NTD Television and The Epoch Times are proud partners of the campaign. Take a look. There's a lot of disbelief when it comes to mass atrocities, simply because they're so out of sync with what people know in their everyday life. And, I mean, this was true of the Holocaust and it's been true of other mass atrocities since. I'm David Matis. I'm an international human rights lawyer. I'm based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. There was a woman with the pseudonym Annie who made a public statement in Washington, D.C. in 2006 that her ex-husband had been harvesting corneas from Pelungan practitioners. Other doctors had been harvesting other organs. The Pelungan practitioners were killed through organ extraction. Their bodies were cremated. Their organs were sold to Chinese and transplant tourists. The government of China denied this. There was an NGO, the Coalition to End Persecution Against the Pelungan, that developed a list of 20 human rights people who could maybe investigate. David Kilgore was on the list. He was a former member of parliament and a former cabinet minister. He says, yeah, I will. I know David Matis. Myself, I'm a refugee lawyer. I have been since the 70s. I'm also used to dealing with the sort of situation that was presented here, which was that there was no evidence. Nobody to say this had happened to them. No bodies to autopsy. No witnesses other than perpetrators. The transplant volume shot way up after the persecution of Pelungan began. We had investigators calling into hospitals, pretending to be relatives of patients who needed transplants, and asking the hospitals if they had organs of Pelungan for sale on the basis that Pelungan were healthy. We had admissions throughout China, tape transcribed, translated, which you can hear today, saying, yeah, sure, come on down. Once we did our report, which came out in July 2006, we basically carried on trying to deal with the issue. We produced a subsequent report, 2007, a third version, 2009, in book form under the title, Bloody Harvest. There was a journalist, Ethan Gutman, who interviewed us and then wrote his own book called The Slaughter. And we formed an NGO together, the three of us, called the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, which is still functioning today. It's quite active. The Chinese government, they really have nothing to say in response, that it's basically just a cover-up rather than a refutation. I've been talking about the issue and writing about the issue, and also I've been making a lot of parliamentary submissions. Now there's a Council of Europe Treaty against Trafficking in Human Organs. About 20 countries that have legislation now about cross-border transplant abuse, whereas when we started there was none. It's sort of, I would say, taken a long time, but I think there's a lot more awareness of the abuse now and willingness to do something about it. The relative lack of attention to the abuse, given the seriousness of the abuse, can be explained by a number of factors. One of them is people were not familiar with Falun Gong, and many of them still are not. There's a lot of Chinese, of course, counter-propaganda against Falun Gong. I would say there's a lot of disbelief when it comes to mass atrocities, simply because they're so out of sync with what people know in their everyday life. And there's also the factor of China being geopolitically, economically very important, and a lot of people have other agendas with China besides this. And what we've seen now, a couple decades, is the spread of the abuse. I mean, we did a report, it was primarily Falun Gong, with Uyghurs, Tibetans, and house Christians in smaller numbers. The numbers of Uyghurs shot way up after 2017. It's going to other countries, it's going to other populations, there's people disappearing off the streets in China, there's infants being sourced for organs now. It's like any other human rights violation, you don't stop it, it spreads. I mean, you can't wait for someone to come and try to kill you for your organs to start objecting. They're not just crimes against those groups, they're crimes against humanity, and crimes against humanity are crimes against us all.