A bill tackling systematic forced organ harvesting in China is now headed to the House after getting the Senate green light on Sept. 28.

S.4009, with support from 12 bipartisan sponsors, passed the Senate with unanimous consent.

Dubbed the Falun Gong and Victims of Forced Organ Harvesting Protection Act, the bill addresses an issue that is gaining growing attention in the United States.

In the past, I have written three articles about China’s practice of taking organs from unwilling donors (here, here, and here). The practice has been going on for some time, and it is encouraging that the American Congress may actually take a stand against it.

The article notes:

As early as 2006, whistleblowers raised the alarm about the abuses taking place in China under Beijing’s auspices.

In 2019, the London-based China Tribunal concluded a year-long investigation into the issue. Forced organ harvesting, it found, had taken place in the country for years “on a significant scale.” A major victim group is practitioners of Falun Gong, according to the tribunal ruling.

The tribunal also said Uyghur Muslims were at risk while being detained in “re-education camps” in China’s Xinjiang. More than 1 million Muslims have been held in internment camps in the region, the U.S. government said.

Falun Gong, a spiritual practice with meditative exercises based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, drew an estimated following of 70 million to 100 million people in China during the 1990s. It has faced harsh suppression since 1999, when the Chinese Communist Party initiated a nationwide persecution in 1999 to wipe it out.

Survivors from both campaigns have recounted arbitrary arrests, forced labor, and grueling torture in prison.

Meanwhile, China’s organ transplant industry continues to grow, drawing patients from all over the world with waiting times as short as days—compared with possibly years in the West.

The article explains what the bill does:

The bill would sanction foreign individuals for carrying out or facilitating the abuse, barring them from entering the United States and blocking them from having U.S. transactions. Those violating the sanctions risk facing up to $250,000 for a civil offense, or $1 million and 20 years in prison in criminal penalties.

It also directs the State Department to conduct an investigation with input from the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, the director of the National Institutes of Health, and the relevant heads of the intelligence community.

Within a year of the bill’s passage, the secretary of state would report to Congress about China’s organ transplantation practices and policies. The report would assess whether the Chinese regime conducts systematic forced organ harvesting and look into where the organs are from, how fast they are obtained, and whether that timetable is practical in the country.

This is a bill that needs to be passed quickly.