China Bends Vow, Using Prisoners’ Organs for Transplants

November 17, 2015

(New York Times) – It seemed to end a decades-long form of human exploitation in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of organs of executed prisoners were harvested each year. But organs from prisoners, including those on death row, can still be used for transplants in China, with the full backing of policy makers, according to Chinese news reports, as well as doctors and medical researchers in China and abroad. “They just reclassified prisoners as citizens,” said Huige Li, a Chinese-born doctor at the University of Mainz in Germany.