The bill passed in a 413-2 vote.
QUICK FACTS:
- The U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 1154, the “Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act,” which places sanctions on and penalizes anyone involved with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) organ harvesting.
- “State-sponsored forced organ harvesting is big business for Xi and the Chinese Communist Party and shows absolutely no signs of abating,” said the bill’s primary sponsor Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) during a debate on the bill.
- Leading co-sponsors of the bill include Reps. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Bill Keating (D-MA), and Kathy Manning (D-NC).
- The bill fights the CCP’s “ghoulish industry of stealing organs from young people, especially Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs and other Central Asians in concentration camps,” according to a press release.
- “People are finally waking up to the brutality of the CCP,” Smith added in the release. “We in the United States—in the medical field in particular—must examine our moral complicity in this most heinous of crimes.”
- Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) were the only congressional leaders to vote against the bill.
- Massie told the Daily Caller that the “bill gives the President unilateral broad authority to sanction individuals and politicians without any adjudication or due process. Furthermore, according to language in this bill, anyone who receives or offers compensation for an organ donation could be defined as an organ trafficker eligible for punitive actions from the US President.”
- Rep. Greene tweeted that the bill “encourages more US involvement in globalist organizations.”
FROM THE BILL:
- H.R. 1154 specifically combats “forced organ harvesting and trafficking in persons for purposes of the removal of organs, and for other purposes.”
- The bill amends The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to require reports of “forced organ harvesting and trafficking in persons for purposes of the removal of organs in each foreign country.”
- “Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the President shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a list of each person that the President determines funds, sponsors, or otherwise facilitates forced organ harvesting or trafficking in persons for purposes of the removal of organs,” the bill adds.
- Individuals complicit in organ trafficking may also be ineligible to enter the United States, have a visa revoked, and be blocked from property transactions.
BACKGROUND:
- A Nurses Summit on Combatting and Preventing Forced Organ Harvesting was held in November 2022 to bring awareness to the CCP’s forced organ harvesting that has gone on since 2006.
- The panel included two witnesses from China, one of whom was a survivor of torture at a Chinese labor camp, the other lost her father at the hands of the CCP.
- Organ harvesting has become “one of the world’s most profitable” industries, one nurse told journalists.
