The House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced a bill to protect political prisoners from having their organs harvested – a practice believed to have been accelerated by the Chinese against their Muslim prisoners in 2017.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., authored the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023 after hearing testimony from survivors.
Aside from Muslim victims, the Chinese Communist Party is believed to target the Falun Gong spiritual movement, killing its members and harvesting organs for the black market, reports Breitbart.
The bill was sent to the House floor, where it will be debated and possibly made into law.
The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act would allow the Secretary of State to refuse to give passports to Americans convicted of stealing organs and ban foreigners implicated in such crimes from entering the U.S.
According to Smith's office, the bill would "block and prohibit all transactions in property and interests in property and makes that person inadmissible to the United States and ineligible to receive a visa."
Uyghur surgeon Enver Tohti testified that organ harvesting began in Chinese Turkistan around 1990. Breitbart reported Tohti said the Chinese forced him to remove the heart and other organs from a prisoner who had been shot in the head.
It is believed that Uyghurs, the Falun Gong, Tibetans, and Christians are targeted.
A report by the Australian National University from last year confirmed China's practice of organ harvesting as a form of execution.
"The leader of China's transplant sector wrote in 2007 that effectively 95% of all organ transplants were from prisoners," reads the study.
It continues: "If the reports we examine are accurate, they indicate that heart and lung procurement by the surgeon was the proximate cause of the prisoner's death, thus directly implicating the surgeon in the execution."