(Minghui.org) China’s Transplant Congress 2014 was held on October 29 and ran through October 31 in Hangzhou. The event was pushed forward despite international exposure and condemnation of forced live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China.

However, the conference was not widely publicized as in previous years and its website has no English content. Foreign organ transplant experts who used to participate in the conference were not invited. The conference was not reported in the China's official media except for a brief local media report. The location of Hangzhou is a reminder of why.

At the last China Transplant Conference, held last November in Hangzhou, Chinese officials, with officials from international organizations observing, signed the Hangzhou Resolution, which promised to phase out the use of executed prisoners as a source for organ transplants. Officials of at least forty hospitals agreed to follow the resolution.

In actuality, several hospitals continued to conduct organ transplantation with organs obtained within one to two weeks, some even as short as one day in the past few months, which indicates the existence and continued use of live donors. The hospitals have violated the resolution by continuing to enlist patients for illegal organ transplantation. They even collaborate with the government in an attempt to legitimize the organ source. This has severely disappointed international transplant organizations.

The hosting organization of the World Organ Transplant Congress, held in San Francisco in July 2014, declined the attendance of 35 Chinese doctors due to medical ethics.

DAFOH (Doctors against the Forced Organ Harvesting) made a statement calling on international organ transplant experts not to participate or support China's organ transplant conference and relevant activities. It also called upon Chinese Communist regime to stop the unethical act of forced live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience.

The Medical Society of Virginia, which consists of more than 9000 medical doctors, nurses and relevant professionals, passed a resolution condemning the systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting in China and to express its support for the pending House Resolution 281 in the U.S. Congress of the same nature.

H.Res.281 was initiated in the summer of 2013 by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen from Florida and Congressman Robert Andrews from New Jersey to condemn the systematic, state-sanctioned, forced organ harvesting in China. The resolution was marked up by the Committee of Foreign Affairs on July 30, 2014, and is waiting for a vote on the House floor. The resolution “calls on the Government of the People’s Republic of China and Communist Party of China to immediately end the practice of organ harvesting from all prisoners;

“demands an immediate end to the 15-year persecution of the Falun Gong spiritual practice by the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Communist Party of China, and the immediate release of all Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience.”

The Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking in Human Organs was passed on July 9, 2014. It calls all countries to sign the convention and “take the necessary legislative and other measures to establish as a criminal offense under its domestic law, when committed intentionally, the removal of human organs from living or deceased donors.”