Falun Gong Protection Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McCORMICK. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 4132) to provide for the imposition of sanctions with respect to forced organ harvesting within the People's Republic of China, and for other purposes, as amended.

The Clerk read the title of the bill.

The text of the bill is as follows: H.R. 4132

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ``Falun Gong Protection Act''. SEC. 2. STATEMENT OF POLICY.

It is the policy of the United States to--

(1) avoid any cooperation with the PRC in the organ transplantation field while the Chinese Communist Party remains in power;

(2) take appropriate measures, including using relevant sanctions authorities, to coerce the Chinese Communist Party to end any state-sponsored organ harvesting campaign; and

(3) work with allies, partners, and multilateral institutions to highlight China's persecution of Falun Gong and coordinate closely with the international community on targeted sanctions and visa restrictions. SEC. 3. IMPOSITION OF SANCTIONS WITH RESPECT TO FORCED ORGAN HARVESTING WITHIN THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA.

(a) Imposition of Sanctions.--The President shall impose the sanctions described in subsection (c) with respect to each foreign person included in the most recent list submitted pursuant to subsection (b).

(b) List of Persons.--

(1) In general.--Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the President shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a list of foreign persons who the President determines to have knowingly and directly engaged in or facilitated the involuntary harvesting of organs within the People's Republic of China.

(2) Updates or lists.--The President shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees an updated list under paragraph (1)--

(A) as new information becomes available;

(B) not later than one year after the date of the enactment of this Act; and

(C) annually thereafter until the date of termination under subsection (h).

(3) Form.--The list required by paragraph (1) shall be submitted in unclassified form, but may include a classified annex.

(c) Sanctions Described.--The sanctions described in this subsection are the following:

(1) Blocking of property.--The President shall exercise all of the powers granted to the President by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (except that the requirements of section 202 of such Act (50 U.S.C. 1701) shall not apply) to the extent necessary to block and prohibit all transactions in property and interests in property of the person if such property and interests in property are in the United States, come within the United States, or are or come within the possession or control of a United States person.

(2) Inadmissibility of certain individuals.--

(A) Ineligibility for visas, admission, or parole.--A foreign person included in the most recent list submitted pursuant to subsection (b) is--

(i) inadmissible to the United States;

(ii) ineligible to receive a visa or other documentation to enter the United States; and

(iii) otherwise ineligible to be admitted or paroled into the United States or to receive any other benefit under the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101 et seq.).

(B) Currrnt visas revoked.--A foreign person described in subparagraph (A) is also subject to the following:

(i) Revocation of any visa or other entry documentation regardless of when the visa or other entry documentation is or was issued.

(ii) A revocation under clause (i) shall take effect immediately and automatically cancel any other valid visa or entry documentation that is in the foreign person's possession.

(3) Exception.--Sanctions under paragraph (2) shall not apply to an alien if admitting or paroling the alien into the United States is necessary to permit the United States to comply with the Agreement regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations, signed at Lake Success June 26, 1947, and entered into force November 21, 1947, between the United Nations and the United States, or other applicable international obligations of the United States.

(d) Penalties.--The penalties provided for in subsections (b) and (c) of section 206 of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1705) shall apply to a person who violates, attempts to violate, conspires to violate, or causes a violation of regulations promulgated to carry out subsection (a) to the same extent that such penalties apply to a person who commits an unlawful act described in section 206(a) of that Act.

(e) Exception To Comply With National Security.--The following activities shall be exempt from sanctions under this section:

(1) Activities subject to the reporting requirements under title V of the National Security Act of 1947 (50 U.S.C. 3091 et seq.).

(2) Any authorized intelligence or law enforcement activities of the United States.

(f) Exception Relating to Provision of Humanitarian Assistance.--Sanctions under this section may not be imposed with respect to transactions or the facilitation of transactions for--

(1) the sale of agricultural commodities, food, or medicine;

(2) the provision of vital humanitarian assistance;

(3) financial transactions relating to humanitarian assistance or for humanitarian purposes; or

(4) transporting goods or services that are necessary to carry out operations relating to humanitarian assistance or humanitarian purposes.

(g) Waiver Authority.--

(1) Waiver.--The President may, on a case by case basis, waive the imposition of any sanction under this section if the President determines such waiver is in the vital national security interest of the United States.

(2) Reports.--Not later than 120 days after the date on which the President submits the list under subsection (b), and every 120 days thereafter until the date of termination under subsection (h), the President shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a report on the extent to which the President has used the waiver authority under paragraph (1) during the period covered by that report.

(h) Sunset.--The authority to impose sanctions under this section shall terminate on the date that is 5 years after the date of the enactment of this Act. SEC. 4. REPORT.

(a) In General.--Not later than one year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Director of the National Institutes of Health, shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a report on the organ transplant policies and practices of the People's Republic of China.

(b) Matters To Be Included.--The report required under subsection (a) shall include--

(1) a summary of de jure and de facto policies toward organ transplantation in the PRC, including with respect to prisoners of conscience (including Falun Gong) and other prisoners;

(2)(A) the number of organ transplants that are known to occur or are estimated to occur on an annual basis in the PRC;

(B) the number of known or estimated voluntary organ donors in the PRC;

(C) an assessment of the sources of organs for transplant in the PRC; and

(D) an assessment of the time, in days, that it takes to procure an organ for transplant within the Chinese medical system and an assessment of whether such timetable is possible based on the number of known or estimated organ donors in the PRC;

(3) a list of all United States grants over the past ten years that have supported research on organ transplantation in the PRC or in collaboration between a Chinese and a United States entity; and

(4) a determination as to whether the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners within the People's Republic of China constitutes an ``atrocity'' (as such term is defined in section 6 of the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018 (Public Law 115-441; 22 U.S.C. 2656 note)).

(c) Form.--The report required under subsection (a) shall be submitted in unclassified form, but may include a classified annex. SEC. 5. EXCEPTION RELATING TO IMPORTATION OF GOODS.

(a) In General.--The authorities and requirements to impose sanctions authorized under this Act shall not include the authority or requirement to impose sanctions on the importation of goods.

(b) Good Defined.--In this section, the term ``good'' means any article, natural or man-made substance, material, supply or manufactured product, including inspection and test equipment, and excluding technical data. SEC. 6. APPROPRIATE CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEES DEFINED.

In this Act, the term ``appropriate congressional committees'' means--

(1) the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives; and

(2) the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate.

Mr. Speaker, for decades the House of Representatives has been raising alarms about the ghoulish organ harvesting perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party.

The People's Republic of China executes thousands of people a year, several times more than the rest of the world combined, but they hide those killings from outsiders, claiming that execution information is a state secret.

Behind that veil of secrecy lies a terrifying reality. For years, testimony and investigative reports have asserted that organs are forcibly harvested as part of an extremely lucrative trade in human organs for transplant into those in the good graces of the party, and for those, including foreigners, willing to pay top dollar.

As summarized in 2021 by United Nations human rights officials, ``forced organ harvesting in China appears to be targeting specific ethnic, linguistic, or religious minorities held in detention, often without being explained the reasons for arrest or given arrest warrants.''

Falun Gong adherents and Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang are among those reportedly targeted. Certain religious and ethnic minority detainees are reportedly subjected to nonconsensual tests not required of other prisoners, such as blood tests, organ exams, and ultrasound scans, with the results being entered into a database of living organ sources.

These depraved CCP abuses must stop. The bill before us today requires the identification and sanctioning of those involved in China's involuntary organ harvesting.

I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry) and his bipartisan cosponsors for introducing this legislation. I also commend Chairman McCaul and Ranking Member Meeks for marking it up and getting it to the floor.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McCORMICK. Mr. Speaker, in closing, the idea that a member of a religious minority could be targeted and killed so that their organs could be harvested is worthy of a horror movie. It violates the basic tenets of our God-given rights, but that is allegedly what the Chinese Communist Party has been doing for years.

This bill before us today will impose visa- and property-blocking sanctions against those responsible for such atrocities. It deserves our unanimous support, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 4132, the Falun Gong Protection Act, introduced by the gentleman from Pennsylvania, Rep. Scott Perry.

The issue of the forced harvesting of human organs is one that is so horrific, and so evil, that it has truly consumed me ever since evidence of the practice began to trickle out at the end of the last century.

I held a congressional hearing in 2012 that focused on ``Organ Harvesting of Religious and Political Dissidents by the Chinese Communist Party,'' though as early as 1998, witnesses at hearings I chaired had testified to the taking of organs from executed prisoners by Chinese government officials. This heinous practice soon matriculated to the most cruel instrument of religious and political persecution, targeting in particular peaceful practitioners of the Falun Gong religion.

I co-convened a follow-up hearing in June of 2016 on ``Organ Harvesting: An Examination of a Brutal Practice.'' I noted at the time that the gruesome practice was not limited to the People's Republic of China--ISIS, for example, issued fatwas allowing the harvesting of organs of ``infidels,'' and Eritrean trafficking victims who could not produce sufficient funds were placed on a gurney and carved up in human chop shops in the Sinai peninsula. Yet by far and away the most systematic, and state-sanctioned harvesting of human organs, has occurred in Communist China.

In 2022, a meta study came out in the American Journal of Transplantation that examined over 2,800 Chinese language academic articles concluding that Chinese transplant surgeons had routinely violated the ``dead donor'' rule, unethically removing organs before victims had been declared brain dead. Since 2015, data indicated that Chinese hospitals have performed many times more organ transplants than the highest estimates of ethically-available donors can account for.

I thus invited one of the authors of that study, Dr. Matthew Robertson, to testify at a hearing I convened at the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on ``Forced Organ Harvesting in China: Examining the Evidence.''

Finally, just this past March, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China held a hearing which I chaired on ``Stopping the Crime of Organ Harvesting--What More Must Be Done?''

Shockingly, one of our witnesses, Dr. Maya Mitalipova, from MIT, implicated an American company, Thermo Fisher Scientific, in selling kits to identify human leukocyte antigens and other DNA profiling products in China, which enables the finding of compatible organ matches, to be obtained forcibly from hapless and helpless ``donors,'' killed for their organs.

Beyond the hearings I have held over the years, I introduced the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act in 2021, and again reintroduced this bill at the beginning of this Congress. Indeed, our legislation passed out of the House over a year ago, in March of 2023, and has been languishing in the Senate since then.

I view Rep. Perry's and my legislation as complementary, and I call upon the House to pass Mr. Perry's bill, and the Senate to move H.R. 1154, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, so that it can arrive on the President's desk for his signature.

Finally, I note that the just-released State Department 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report has focused its attention on the trafficking of persons for the purpose of organ removal as a topic of special interest, citing reports of systematic, forcible removal of organs from political prisoners by the government of the People's Republic of China.

That the State Department did so I believe was in part due to the pressure imposed by Congress, which underscores the importance of what we are doing here today.

I therefore call upon the House to pass H.R. 4132, and the Senate to move H.R. 1154 onto the President's desk.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source