A landmark speech was delivered today (5 Nov) by leading international human rights lawyer, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who presented the damning findings of the China Tribunal to the UK Parliament’s newly-formed China Research Group for the first time.
The presentation marks the latest, and highest profile occasion in which China’s organ harvesting crimes have been brought to the attention of one of the world’s leading Governments, as the call for a UK-China relationship reset continues to intensify.
The China Tribunal’s Judgment, which exposed an elaborate state-backed programme to incarcerate and murder its own innocent citizens in an illicit trade of forced organ removal for over 20 years, was heard by the China Research Group in a briefing held at 10am today.
Sir Geoffrey was also joined by China Tribunal panel member, Professor Martin Elliott, and Counsel to the China Tribunal, Hamid Sabi, who first delivered the damning Judgment to the United Nations Human Rights Council in September last year.
The China Research Group, led by Tom Tugendhat MP, was formed in April to examine the UK’s future relationship with China, as well as investigating the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) long-term economic and diplomatic goals following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking in April, Mr Tugendhat, who also chairs the UK’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, called out “Beijing’s long pattern of information suppression” in addition to stating that China “deliberately falsified the data” relating to the outbreak of COVID-19.
The presentation of China’s organ harvesting crimes to the China Research Group comes after growing national awareness of the Chinese Government’s policy of internal suppression, increasing rejection of international human rights, and its cover up and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Commenting on the China Tribunal’s Judgment, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, declared, “For years, it may have suited governments and global organisations to turn a blind eye to the crime of forced organ harvesting in China, and instead argue that there was no real evidence of these horrifying crimes.”
“Following the China Tribunal’s Judgment, which found, beyond any reasonable doubt that in China, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims, it is no longer possible to ignore these crimes and it will be for the China Research Group, and the UK Government now to decide whether to investigate and reset their relationship with the CCP,” he added.
In 2019, the independent Tribunal saw over 50 witnesses testify. Huge volumes of written evidence were analysed, including research showing the deliberate falsification of China’s public organ donation data that helped the CCP to cover-up the killing of innocent people, primarily peaceful Falun Gong practitioners, to support a trade in human organs.
“The China Tribunal’s Judgment now exists in the public eye so that these horrifying crimes are no longer hidden to the world… Our Government, and the medical community which I belong to, simply cannot continue to ignore them,” added Professor Martin Elliott, China Tribunal panel member.