It has been widely reported around the world that the Chinese government’s organ transplant policy is a human rights atrocity – last week a group of Chinese Australians stopped off in Yamba to raise awareness of the practice. In June this year, former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour, human rights lawyer David Matas, and journalist Ethan Gutmann released a report that shows, they say, that organ transplants are carried out in China 10 times more than official government figures reveal. “The (Communist Party) says the total number of legal transplants is about 10,000 per year,” Mr Matas said in a statement. “But we can easily surpass the official Chinese figure just by looking at the two or three biggest hospitals.” The report estimates that 60,000 to 100,000 organs are transplanted each year in Chinese hospitals. “The ultimate conclusion is that the Chinese Communist Party has engaged the state in the mass killings of innocents, primarily practitioners of the spiritually based set of exercises, Falun Gong, but also Uyghurs, Tibetans, and select House Christians, in order to obtain organs for transplants,” the report states. One of the members of the ‘Australia National Car Tour for Stopping Organ Harvesting in China’ initiative, Tracy Huang, said the tour began on August 29, as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was preparing to attend the G20 summit in China. “We are volunteers on a journey around the towns to raise awareness of the harvesting and persecution going on in China for 70 years or more,” she said. “Our aim is to just raise awareness and call on the government to pass a resolution similar to those passed by the US and European parliaments, urging China to stop organ harvesting organs and the persecution of Falun Gong.” Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting has been nominated for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize “for a decade of determination in raising awareness, especially within the medical community, of unethical organ transplant practices in China and other regions”. The winner is due to be announced this Friday October 7. Ms Huang said that the “Falun Dafa Association wants to inform the people across the states and territories of Australia about the nature of the Chinese transplant industry and of our personal experiences”. “Aware Australians can then ask our government to take a tougher stance on the continuing forced human organ harvesting policy in China,” she said. For more information go to: www.faluninfo.net or www.stoporganharvesting.org.