Mark Allison - from Hong Kong
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Organization / Profession:
Amnesty International Asia Pacific Regional Office, China Researcher
Transcript of the video:
Well China is increasingly isolated, I think, there is this worldwide trend towards abolition and China is clearly standing outside that, and the more countries that abolish the death penalty, and hopefully with more countries abolishing the death penalty in this region, in Asia, for example, the recent example in the Philippines, possibility of abolition in South Korea, possibly Taiwan as well, that will lead to increasing pressure on China to reform to abolish the death penalty as well.
Well it's a concern that we've raised for many many years, I think it's very well documented in China that many death penalty prisoners have their organs extracted then transplanted at the time of execution. One of the real problems with China is the whole secrecy surrounding both the process of execution, so it's completely unclear whether people are actually consenting to these transplants or not, and secrecy surrounding statistics as well so it's impossible to know how many people are executed in China because this is deemed to be a state secret. Now if people are giving their organs for transplant, certainly the Chinese government says that this is all done with consent, that the people have to give written consent, what we would say from our point of view is that according to medical standards, how is it possible for someone to give free consent to having their organs transplanted when they're facing the trauma and anguish of being executed at any point. So this is not a situation when one can make a free choice. The other concern is that if organs are being transplanted, and increasingly in China that's becoming a very commercial transaction given the profits that can be made from organ transplants in China, particularly now since the health system has been commercialized and there are big profits to be made, this will be an incentive for that practice to continue.
One of the key things to do is to make sure that the public is better informed, for example that the death penalty is not necessarily a better deterrent than any other form of punishment and that people, no one who is sentenced to death in China faces a fair trial, and given that that's the situation, it's quite likely, and the cases that have been published lately in the press in China recently show that miscarriages of justice can be carried out very frequently and that the innocent can be killed. Now those arguments need to be quite clear in people's minds in order for them to come to a very clear and informed decision. Again, no government in the world has actually abolished the death penalty because of support from the public; it's always been a government-led initiative in terms of improving human rights and coming into compliance with international standards. So the government needs to take a lead in putting these arguments in the public domain and making sure the public is informed about these arguments for abolition of the death penalty rather than merely trying to use it as a tool to control the population or supposedly to control crime.