(Clearwisdom.net) The Global Human Rights Torch Relay was initiated in Athens, Greece on August 9, 2007. It started a relay through European countries and raised concerns throughout the international community. The relay was sponsored by the "Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong" (CIPFG). When asked by a reporter whether the Chinese Communist Party has kept its promise to improve its human rights record, the President of the U.S and Canada Leading Group of CIPFG, Clive Ansley, pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party has seriously failed to keep this promise. He also stated that the CCP's crimes of organ-harvesting from living Falun Gong prisoners for organ transplant surgeries is still ongoing.

Record of the interview, listen on-line (17 Min. and 2 Seconds)
Record of the interview, RM download (4.1 MB)
Record of the interview,MP3 download(7.9 MB)

Clive Ansley is a solicitor and barrister, and the country monitor for China within the group, " Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada." He has been actively involved with China and Sino-Canadian relations for more than forty years. He practiced law in China for fourteen years. Mr. Ansley has served as an expert witness on the Chinese legal system for a number of different countries including Canada, the United States and various European countries, and he can read and speak Chinese. He is a China expert.

"Even the Nazis in Germany Didn't Come up With This"

Ansley said, "It is blatantly obvious that not only has the Chinese Communist Party not kept any promise to improve the situation, but that the human rights abuses are worse today than they have ever been in the past."

"One of the things when we get into a discussion of this issue, that comes up continuously, I find that people who are talking about human rights in China, whether they have improved or gotten worse, very often the speakers start talking about different concepts all together."

"When I say human rights have never been worse in China, I'm often questioned by people who say, 'Well, we no longer have the Street Committee, and people are free to go to the Hard Rock Café at night, and they have bars, and entertainment, all sorts of things that they didn't have before. They (the Chinese Communist Party) have less control over their daily lives, so of course things are improving.'"

"I would agree with them if that's what we were talking about, but that's not how I define human rights."

"It is true that people have more freedom of operation today and in their daily lives, but that's only because the Chinese Communist Party doesn't care about those things. They are sufficiently politically sophisticated to know if they kept up the old style of repression that we had under Mao, with people peering through their bedrooms at night and regulating the most personal aspects of people's everyday life, and forcing them to take part in political campaigns and to march and wave banners, and so forth... They know that people had had enough of that and they would be facing a revolt. They also realized, because they don't have any ideology anymore, they don't care if Chinese people listen to so-called 'bourgeois- liberal' music, decadent music. They don't care about any of that stuff, the only thing they care about is maintaining their absolute dictatorship in power. People are not going to be organizing a revolt against the government if they are reasonably satisfied with the material things in their lives. If they can buy an air ticket, and take a holiday, and go to Xinjiang. Those things are better in China, there is no question at all."

"When I talk about human rights being worse than they've ever been before, I'm talking about things that I think are slightly more important than whether or not you're allowed to go to the Hard Rock Café at night. When we talk about the fact that there are undoubtedly tens of thousands of human beings today that are being kept alive in herds, the concept is that they are herding these people. Kept alive to be killed, on demand, as needed to provide their organs for sale to international clients in the organ market. When we look at that, how in the world can we talk about human rights? How can we even include a government like this in the society of nations? David Matas and David Kilgour in their report said, 'This is a new kind of evil'. Even the Nazis in Germany didn't come up with this."

As a lawyer, in terms of how to define human rights, Clive Ansley's position is that "you haven't even spoken to the issue of human rights if people do not have freedom of speech. If you do not have freedom of speech, if you cannot oppose the government of the day, if you don't have freedom of assembly, if you don't have freedom of religion, then you don't really have any fundamental human rights. Yes you can go out to the Hard Rock Café, you can go listen to a jazz concert, you can go to a risqué fashion show that aren't much more than strip shows, okay great if that is what you mean by human rights, then it is making progress. But the fundamental human rights have gone backwards. My point in talking about the organ trade is that if you have something that is as blatantly bestial and uncivilized as this, how can you even discuss the improvement in human rights? "

"There Is No Doubt At All About the Organ Harvesting Happening in China"

When asked, "What if, as said by some westerners, the organ-harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners is only allegations?" or "What if the organ-harvesting described by David Matas as 'the new kind of evil' never happened, or is no longer happening in China?" Clive Ansley responded,"There is no doubt at all about it, and just to comment and go back to the beginning of your comment, because you covered quite a few things there in your question. First off, you say westerners say these are just allegations by David Kilgour and David Matas."

"The first thing I would point out is, both these individuals have absolutely impeccable credentials. Both with David Matas and with David Kilgour, there is no one outside the Chinese government, I would say, who would attack one of these people in terms of their credibility. Now their credibility by itself doesn't mean that the charges are true, it's simply that they [have] a long and absolutely unquestioned history of being very principled people, very well-trained people. They're both lawyers, they are well-trained in evidence and in carrying out investigations and analyses of evidence. They were retained independently, in this case, so the credentials are not in question at all."

"After that, it's only a question of reading their report. I would guess that any western critics of Matas and Kilgour have not read their report. I have read their report in its entirety, and I think that evidence is overwhelming. Like David Kilgour and David Matas, I'm sorry I have to come to that conclusion."

"I would like to conclude that these are false charges and that it's not going on, but I don't think anyone who understands conditions in China and understands the difficulties coming up with what is sometimes called a 'smoking gun' in this kind of a case, and understands the fundamental principles of evidence... I don't think anybody could read that report and not come away thinking that there is an overwhelming support for the unfortunate conclusion that this is going on. "

"Now I'm choosing my words very carefully, I don't say 'prove'. One of the things I think any reader should be impressed with when they read the report by Kilgour and Matas is that they don't say any piece of evidence in there proves that this is happening. They point out the obvious, that when people are being murdered on the operating table, you're not going to find a smoking gun, you're not going to find absolute incontrovertible proof of any particular murder."

"Some people have said the Beijing government could tidy up like in the case of Su Jia Tun, for example, the first area where this practice was discovered. Two or three weeks later the Beijing government had people from the U.S. embassy come in, they looked around and they said, 'We couldn't find any evidence of this going on'. Some people said of course they couldn't find evidence, Beijing had two or three weeks in which to cover up in there before the American inspectors came. But that doesn't even scratch the surface of the problem."

'If we assume for the moment that this is going on, people are operated on and their organs taken out while on the operating table and they die, what would an inspector expect to find even if he came in the middle of the operation? People are being operated on all the time in hospital operating rooms, there's a lot of blood, there are body parts removed, people die on the operating tables. What would anybody expect to find? "

"Now, what Kilgour and Matas did, is they had Chinese speaking people posing as people who needed organs calling hospitals in China, talking to doctors, saying we want Falun Gong donors, because we hear that they are healthier people. They live a healthy lifestyle, so we would like Falun Gong donors. Do you have Falun Gong donors available? We have doctors in Chinese hospitals saying yes we have a lot of them right now. Or in other cases, we use to have them but we don't right now, call the hospital in Guang Zhou, they have Falun Gong donors. Or saying we don't have them right now, but we can get them for you. Or saying we always use living donors, we don't use organs from brain dead donors."

"We have hospitals' websites, many have been closed down since this thing was exposed. On the websites, they are guaranteeing that they can find a compatible organ, in some cases within two weeks, in some cases within two days. This is just absolutely impossible unless you had a system like this operating."

"We have doctors in the West who specialize in transplants operations and the transplant organs, and they will tell you there is no possible way that you can guarantee to find compatible blood, compatible tissue in a volunteering donor within those time periods. Anybody in the West who is looking for a transplant, will wait up to 5 years or they may die before they ever get it."

"We have many more voluntary donors in the West. For cultural reasons the Chinese very seldom agree to donate organs, it's almost unheard of. It would be the hardest place on the planet to locate voluntary donors of organs."

"And what do we have here? The only way to maintain the numbers of transplants that are carried out by Chinese hospitals is to have a huge supply of people standing by whose tissue types and blood types have been programmed, at least the information on it has been fed into computers so that when a foreign patient turns up who needs a kidney, or a heart, or a liver then he will be tested, that information will be fed into a computer, and they will select a living human being who is kept alive just for this kind of match making. "

"That person will have all of his organs taken out of his body and used for transplant purposes. We have any number of transplant surgeons in the West who will verify the claim that these number of transplants simply can't be carried out on any other basis."

"Coming back to Kilgour and Matas and their report, they emphasize over and over again as they go through each piece of evidence, they say does this by itself prove that this is occurring? No it doesn't, but it's highly suggestive. And they moved on to the next piece of evidence and the next. When you take all those things and put them together, it does not prove in the sense that you can carry out a chemical experiment in a lab and prove a certain chemical reaction. It's not proven in the sense of television footage of Falun Gong people being taken in and operated upon, but I don't think any reasonable person can read their report and come away unconvinced that this is what's happening."