[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 103 (Monday, July 14, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H6685-H6686]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         CHINA AND HUMAN RIGHTS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PENCE. Mr. Speaker, as a member of the Committee on International 
Relations and the Human Rights Caucus, I rise today to talk about 
China. I know we in Washington are not talking about China much these 
days other than China is a great example of economic opportunity for 
American enterprise, and so it is. But before the Congressional Human 
Rights Caucus last week, we gathered to hear luminaries like Harry Wu, 
Chinese dissident, founder of the Laogai Research Foundation, and an 
even more famous dissident, Way Ting Sheng, a man who has been 
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a half dozen different times, and 
is known as the Chinese Mandela. They sat in a small congressional 
hearing room last week and spoke about an astonishing reality in China 
that I rise to reflect on today. It involves the execution of prisoners 
on an extraordinary and widespread scale, and the harvest and sale of 
prisoner human organs; and I am going to speak about what the heartfelt 
response of the American people ought to be.
  It was just 64 years ago that the Nazi propaganda machine flaunted 
the Olympic Games coming to Munich and used that backdrop of legitimacy 
to launch the execution of 6 million Jews. In 1980, the Soviet Union 
touted the decision to have the Olympic Games in Moscow, and on the 
very eve of those Olympic Games launched its barbarous war against 
Afghanistan.
  Now, as we look at the 2008 Olympic Games headed for Beijing, China, 
we are reminded of promises by that Communist regime to build eight new 
stadiums to prepare for the contestants. What they do not say is they 
have been using the older stadiums to stage sentencing rallies and to 
publicly condemn prisoners to death. Prisoners are brought to the 
stadiums, as we learned

[[Page H6686]]

last week, held in leg irons where audiences are required to watch 
their sentencing as a lesson in obedience to the law and government; 
and after the show, prisoners are paraded off to a firing squad. It is 
frightening and medieval stuff.
  China today executes more people than all other countries in the 
world combined, according to Amnesty International, some 20,000 
executions over the last decade, an average of 40 people a week; and 
that is just what is public, Mr. Speaker. Not only are they engaged in 
the moral horror of widespread public summary executions, but also 
China is in the business of carefully executing persons and then 
quickly harvesting prisoners' organs for sale on the international 
market. We heard from State Department officials who even acknowledged 
this.
  It is an extraordinary thing, to say the least. The practice of 
taking human organs from condemned prisoners is in itself condemned by 
every known standard of medical ethics in the civilized world, and it 
goes on with American and Western customers paying top dollar for those 
organs each and every day.
  I call on the United States of America and our State Department, as I 
did in the congressional hearing, to act in a number of ways, to issue 
a warning through HHS and the CDC to American citizens who are 
traveling abroad to the Asian Pacific Rim of not only the dangers of 
obtaining a human organ, but of the profound immorality of doing so. It 
is imperative that the United States of America speak in moral terms of 
that which is immoral, and it is immoral to harvest organs from 
condemned prisoners.
  I also challenge the administration to rethink this entire business 
of engagement and to do as Ronald Reagan did whenever his 
administration did visit the Evil Empire, the Soviet Union. They met 
with dissidents; they associated themselves with people who were 
advancing freedom. The Good Book tells us, I am a friend to those who 
fear you, and so the United States should be to the Chinese people, a 
friend to those who cherish liberty and cherish the sanctity of human 
life and condemn the outrage of mass executions and the harvesting of 
human organs.

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