Vatican row as China invited to organ transplant meet

Ethics experts and human rights lawyers slammed the Vatican yesterday for inviting a top Chinese health official to an organ trafficking summit despite concerns it still uses tissue from executed prisoners.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences invited Huang Jiefu, the man in charge of overhauling China's transplant system, to the two-day conference and he was expected to address the floor later yesterday.

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Wendy Rogers, a medical ethics expert at Macquarie University in Australia and the chair of an advisory committee on tackling organ theft in China, slammed Huang's presence as "shocking".

Both the European Parliament and US Congress have recently condemned organ harvesting in China amid widespread concerns tissue is sourced from executed prisoners of conscience.

Victims reportedly include not only death-row prisoners but also religious and ethnic minorities such as Uighurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong spiritual practitioners and "underground" Christians.

Beijing issued its first regulation banning the trade of organs in 2007, but trafficking remains common as the country suffers a drastic shortage of donated body parts.

The practice of using executed prisoners' organs for transplants was also banned in 2015, but some international medical groups suspect prisoners may be being reclassified as voluntary donors to get around the rules.

Rogers and a group of experts including a former surgeon from Xinjiang in China wrote to Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the academy's chancellor, to warn that the church risked appearing to sanction the practice.

The Vatican "should be aware of how the endorsements -- even indirect -- of prestigious foreign bodies are used by China's propaganda apparatus to burnish the reputation of its unethical transplant system," the letter said.

Sorondo's short response, seen by AFP, said the conference aimed "to be an academic exercise and not a reprise of contentious political assertions".

A Vatican spokesman declined to comment on the issue to AFP.

Pope Francis has slammed illicit organ trafficking as a "new form of slavery".

But the Vatican is also keen not to create a diplomatic incident with China. It is trying to re-establish ties with the country after six decades of estrangement.

The hope is to reconnect with China's 12 million Catholics, which are currently divided between a government-run association and an unofficial church which swears allegiance to the Vatican.

Rogers wrote again, insisting the "failure of the academy to examine the evidence that forced organ harvesting has been, and is still happening in China, amounts to a form of complicity in these crimes".

She heard nothing back.

Critics say that while Huang claimed China would stop using organs from executed prisoners from the start of 2015, the country has passed no new laws or regulations outlawing the practice.

China's ratio of public organ donations was 0.6 to 100,000 people in 2014, one of the lowest in the world.