Taking Organs from executed prisoners in China. A change coming?

In Strasbourg on 22nd April, I listened to a lunchtime talk given by the World Medicine Association. The WMA, founded in 1947 and based in Geneva, represents all the doctors of the world and concentrates on “medical ethics”. 

China was a founder member of the WMA in 1947 but soon left when its own internal health service was abolished. They reapplied in 1997. 

Amnesty International has often reported and China confirmed in 2006, that China is taking organs from executed prisoners. Previously whenever China was asked to comment on this, they replied that they first wanted to talk about Taiwan’s membership. They justified taking organs from dead prisoners by insisting that capital punishment is essential in China and that removing a victim’s organs “is their last atonement.” National European governments have been very weak in discussing this problem with China, as they are with every “difficult” subject which might put at risk their lucrative business contracts with China. But the European Parliament has been strong - over Tibet and over other human rights issues and must remain so.

Now, significantly, the Chinese attitude appears to be changing, and not just because of the Olympic Games in Beijing later this summer. China needs the outside world - to publicise its achievements, because it wants to be recognised as the best at transplanting organs, and because there is money to be made from rich outsiders flying to China to receive transplants. 

China has no medical health service for its citizens except along its east coast. It has a hepatitis epidemic - to which transplants are not the solution but needs a large-scale protection programme.

 

Airport security

My Spanish Liberal MEP colleague, Ignasi Guardens, has started a potentially major court case. You may not know that the stringent new regulations for airport security, brought in last year all over Europe, which include the ban on carrying liquids, are an EU law. But it was not passed properly in the opinion of MEPs.

 The correct EU law-making procedure is that the two chambers, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, must agree. In this case, the ministers refused to give us all the details, claiming high security. They announced it as if it were a law. But MEPs believe it is not because we have never been given access to all its details.

 Ignasi, at a Spanish airport, challenged the right of an official to order him to remove his shoes before passing through the security arch. The “law” says that the officials are only entitled to demand shoes be removed if an alarm has sounded, not before. Ignasi, a valiant defender of basic rights, removed his shoes but is taking a case against the airport officials to the Spanish courts, and hopes that the Spanish constitutional court will rule that the EU law is unconstitutional because it was “passed” in secret. The case will then make its way to Europe’s supreme court, the Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

 The “law” is an EU regulation - which means it has to be the same in all 27 EU member states, with no right for any state to add to it or subtract from it. But, of course if you argue, airport officials can make you miss your flight!

There is an interesting and important balance involved here: national security against the right of the citizen to have laws passed correctly.