HONG KONG — China said Friday that it planned to end within three to five years the practice of transplanting organs from executed prisoners, a step that would address what for decades has been one of the country’s most criticized practices in regard to human rights.
A wide range of official media ran articles describing the merits of voluntary organ donations by the public instead. They cited Huang Jiefu, the vice minister of health, as talking at a conference Thursday in the city of Hangzhou about the plan to stop harvesting organs after executions.
“The pledge to abolish organ donations from condemned prisoners represents the resolve of the government,” he said, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
Huang said the rates of fungal infection and bacterial infection in organs taken from executed prisoners were often very high, so the longterm survival rates of organ recipients in China was consistently below the survival rates of recipients in other countries.
Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, welcomed the policy announcement, which the humanrights group has campaigned for since 1994. But he noted that Huang, who turns 66 this year, is about to retire, along with most of the country’s top political leadership.
That means the next generation of political leaders and Health Ministry officials will have to deal with the problem of how to obtain enough voluntary organ donations to offset the country’s heavy dependence on prisoners.
“It’s not clear to me the government is going to have the political will to fulfill this promise,” Bequelin said.
A Health Ministry official in Beijing declined to take questions about the new policy over the phone, asking that questions be submitted by fax instead.
There was no immediate reply to a fax.
For many years, China resisted passing national legislation for organ donation or for establishing when brain death had occurred.
The worry was that particularly in poorer areas of China or areas with lax or particularly corrupt law enforcement, doctors would be tempted to act prematurely in declaring a person to be brain dead.
China’s Cabinet, the State Council, issued regulations in 2007 for voluntary organ donations. But it has struggled to popularize the practice. Traditional Chinese customs call for people to be buried or cremated with their organs intact.
People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, said China has 150 people who need organ transplants for each organ that is donated voluntarily. The newspaper did not say how much of the difference is made up from executed prisoners.
China has 300,000 patients with end-stage liver diseases, but in the first 11 weeks of this year there were only 546 transplants of livers and other major organs, the newspaper said, adding that, “The majority of the sufferers die while waiting agonizingly to receive them.”
The Dui Hua Foundation, a human-rights group in San Francisco, estimated in December that China executes 4,000 people a year. That was down from 8,000 a year in 2007, the year that the Supreme People’s Court regained the authority to conduct a final review of any death sentences approved by lower courts, but the current total is still more than the rest of the world combined.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 03/24/2012