Catholics, Buddhists gather in Cambodia for interreligious meeting focused on peace

Geneva, Switzerland, Sep 26, 2019 / 03:30 pm (CNA).- The Chinese government is harvesting organs from religious and ethnic minorities, a human rights organization told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday. 

The China Tribunal, which calls itself an “independent, international people’s tribunal” that investigates allegations of organ harvesting in the country, is led by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. The tribunal said they found evidence that China is continuing to forcibly collect organs from political and religious prisoners, despite saying they stopped the practice four years ago. 

“Forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, including the religious minorities of Falun Gong and Uighurs, has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale, and that it continues today,” said Hamid Sabi, a lawyer for the China Tribunal speaking at the UN meeting. 

The tribunal estimated that “hundreds of thousands” of people have been used to harvest organs, including hearts. This constitutes crimes against humanity, said Sabi, and is equivalent to genocide.

“Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” he added. 

Although organ donation and transplantation is “a scientific and social triumph,” Sadi said that China’s practice of killing the donor is a crime.

“It is the legal obligation of UN Member States and the duty of this council to address this criminal conduct,” he said. 

China has admitted in the past that it would regularly take the organs of prisoners on death row and use them in transplants, but said they stopped in January 2015. According to the China Tribunal, it is unlikely to be true. The tribunal says there has been an “explosion” of transplants in China over the last two decades, as well as an increase of “transplant tourists” who travel to China to purchase an organ. 

These numbers “suggest a larger supply of organs than could be sourced from executed criminals alone,” says the China Tribunal’s website. This data, coupled with reports from prisoners, leads the Tribunal to conclude that “prisoners of conscience,” who have been detained for no reason other than their faith or ethnic group, are being killed in order to supply organs for the country’s organ trafficking industry. 

Groups detained en masse in China include Uighur Muslims, Tibetans, practitioners of Falun Gong, and people who worship at underground “home churches” that are not recognized by the government. 

On Tuesday, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan spoke at the UN General Assembly, and demanded an investigation into the alleged human rights abuses in the province of Xinjiang. Xinjiang is home to most of the country’s Uighur population. 

“The UN must seek the immediate unhindered, and unmonitored access to Xinjiang for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,” said Sullivan. “The United Nations, including its member states, have a responsibility to stand up for the human rights of people everywhere, including Muslims in Xinjiang.” 

Sullivan added that it is imperative that the UN work to continue to monitor China for human rights abuses, especially “the repression of religious freedom and belief.” 

An estimated 1 million Uighurs, members of a Muslim ethnoreligious group, have been detained in re-education camps in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a region in China’s northwest that is roughly the size of Iran.

Inside the camps they are reportedly subjected to forced labor, torture, and political indoctrination. Outside the camps, Uighurs are monitored by pervasive police forces and facial recognition technology.

The Chinese government has said reports on the camps by Western governments and media are unfounded, claiming they are vocational training centers and that it is combating extremism.

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Hyderabad, Pakistan, Feb 17, 2017 / 11:46 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pakistanis are mourning those killed and wounded in a series of terrorist attacks which have taken place this week in the country, including one on a Sufi shrine that left more than 80 people dead.

“People in Pakistan are above all sad; they are also angry with the institutions that are not able to protect citizens. Finally they feel fragile, vulnerable, helpless in the face of [a] terrorist threat that spares no one,” Fr. Inayat Bernard, director of Santa Maria Seminary in Lahore, told Fides.

“We condemn this senseless violence against innocent human beings. Before any ethnic, cultural or religious connotation, the victims are human beings,” he continued.

A suicide bomber reportedly loyal to the Islamic State attacked devotees at a Sufi shrine in Sehwan, more than 90 miles northwest of Hyderabad, on Thursday. In addition to the more than 80 killed in the attack, some 250 were wounded. Sufism is a form of Islamic mysticism which the Islamic State opposes, in part because it reveres individuals it regards as saints. The shrine in Sehwan which was attacked is devoted to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, a Sufi poet and philosopher of the 13th century.

Since Monday, there have also been terrorist attacks or attempts in Lahore, Quetta, Peshawar, Mohmand, and Arawan.

In a security crackdown in response to the attacks, Pakistani forces have killed more than 100 militants. It has closed border crossings with Afghanistan, whence it claims the militants were based.

“Today we know that we are all potential targets,” Fr. Bernard commented. “Even us Christians – no one is excluded. The victims of these latest attacks are all Muslims, tomorrow it could be the turn of a Christian, a Hindu or a Sikh. This indiscriminate violence hits places of worship, such as the Sufi mosque in Karachi, or churches in the past.”

He lamented that “religious communities are forced to adopt their own security measures and cannot rely on the government. There should be more control, but it is very difficult when there is a great influx of faithful.”

“This violence profanes the name of God, profanes Islam and uses religion to try to overthrow the state. Public opinion strongly calls on the government to urgently implement the national action plan against terrorism, already outlined, but there is some hesitation on behalf of the government and this gives rise to many questions on the possible existing connections even in the institutional apparatus. We are in an impasse”.

Catholics in Pakistan are called to “pray and show deep empathy and solidarity” to the Sufi victims in Sehwan, he said.

“We brought our condolences to the police, after the massacre in Lahore; we go to hospitals to offer assistance and solidarity to the injured,” he said.

He added that interreligious meetings are being organized “to reject, in the name of God, [the] terrorism that has bloodied our beloved nation, and say yes to peace and respect for life.”

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The flag of Burma (Myanmar). / Creative Photo Corner/Shutterstock.

Denver Newsroom, Mar 10, 2022 / 15:20 pm (CNA).
The Myanmar conflict’s destruction continued early Thursday morning, when a military aircraft attack on a town in the east of the… […]