As some New Zealanders face a years-long wait for an organ transplant, looking overseas for a commercial option can be tempting - but one campaigner says Kiwis should think about the human rights abuses which may lead to quicker surgery times
A former Wellington city councillor turned campaigner against ‘transplant tourism’ to China says New Zealand should ban the practice of Kiwis heading overseas for organ transplants.
China has faced ongoing criticism from the international community over allegations it has forcibly harvested the organs of political prisoners (such as Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghur Muslims) to provide transplants ‘on demand’.
An independent tribunal in 2020 concluded that “forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale”, while United Nations human rights experts expressed alarm at the reports in 2021.
The short wait times for a transplant have made the country a popular destination for foreigners in need of a new organ - including some from New Zealand.
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While data is sparse on the number of Kiwis heading to China or elsewhere for a new organ, a piece of 2019 research suggested there were at least one or two cases each year.
Former Wellington city councillor and Values Party founder Tony Brunt told Newsroom he first developed an interest in the issue several years ago, after reading about a Chinese surgeon who had emigrated to Canada after assisting in an organ harvesting operation at a military hospital.
Later on, he met another Chinese doctor at a Falun Gong stall in the Ōtara markets, where they had a discussion about the number of Chinese who may had been “surgically murdered” for their organs.
“I said at the time, ‘Look, I'm not going to walk away on the other side from this, I'm going to become an actor’...I regarded that as a local issue because we all occupy the same planet.”
He had started a campaign of writing to health institutions and government organisations, asking them to do what they could to stop any transplant tourism taking place from New Zealand.
Brunt took particular concern with a non-binding cooperation agreement between the Waitematā District Health Board and the Shandong Provincial Health Commission. After writing to the board in 2019, it agreed to “cease co-operation with Shandong institutions in areas of medicine that may be involved in organ transplantation until the issue is further clarified”, according to a copy of correspondence provided by Brunt.
A spokesman for Te Whatu Ora - Health NZ, which has replaced the country’s DHBs, said it had not cancelled its ties with Chinese organisations, which focused on big data, artificial intelligence and digital transformation. However, the spokesman did not comment on whether those areas of work had been reduced.
Brunt said working with Chinese health providers in areas other than organ transplants was still “a minefield”, given the potential for that work to cross-contaminate other disciplines.
He believed the Government needed to take action to stop transplant tourism to China, and was hopeful of building cross-party support for such a move.
Brunt was among the speakers at an Auckland event last week on the case for legislative reform in the area.
Canadian human rights lawyer Dr David Matas, who co-authored a 2006 report outlining evidence of “large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners”, told the audience the issue of organ harvesting did not get the same attention afforded to other human rights abuses in China, given the difficulty in obtaining information from within the country.
“Nobody who's killed for their organs can get up and speak - their bodies are cremated, there cannot be autopsies. There are no witnesses who say I saw that [and] are innocent - you're either a victim or you're a bystander, because everything happens either in a detention centre or prison, in a van or or in a hospital.”
Matas said roughly 18 countries had extraterritorial legislation banning organ trafficking, something he believed New Zealand should consider along with mandatory reporting from health professionals to the government about cases of transplant tourism.
Dr Nick Cross, a Canterbury nephrologist and clinical director of the national renal transplant service, told Newsroom clinicians would discourage any patient from travelling overseas for transplant tourism, if made aware of their intentions.
“The main reasons are ethical: the subjugation of other populations and the exploitation of people who are in positions [where] they really can’t say no to doing so or are badly abused, and that will include populations in countries where they’re being persecuted for their religious beliefs.”
“There’s not really a mechanism for how often that happens in a New Zealand sense, so that’s why the data is pretty sketchy, but we are engaged in discouraging that part of it because we agree with the international bodies that think it’s immoral.” - Dr Nick Cross
Cross said it was often difficult to intervene beforehand, given Kiwis looking offshore for a new organ would not necessarily inform their doctor in advance, while some people did have legitimate reasons for getting a transplant done overseas (such as the complexity of the procedure, or a family member acting as the donor).
Anyone who did return to New Zealand having undergone surgery elsewhere would receive the same post-transplant care as anyone else, as their healthcare eligibility was unaffected.
“There’s not really a mechanism for how often that happens in a New Zealand sense, so that’s why the data is pretty sketchy, but we are engaged in discouraging that part of it because we agree with the international bodies that think it’s immoral.”
Cross said any attempts to outlaw ‘transplant tourism’ would come with difficulties for doctors who would theoretically be compelled to share their patients’ medical records with the authorities (such disclosures are usually prohibited for privacy reasons, with limited exceptions).
“It’s a big problem [for] those populations overseas, absolutely, but I don’t think New Zealand is contributing a large deal to that.”
With a lack of available organs for people on the waiting list, it was important to enlist as many local donors as possible, he said.
The Chinese government has long denied allegations it engages in organ harvesting, and has claimed to have only used voluntary donors since 2015.
