Why are we falling over ourselves to trade with a mass murderer?

On Saturday, I had the opportunity to be a speaker for one of the films featured at this year's Justice Film Festival at Red Deer College. That allowed me to preview the movie Human Harvest.

The preview was chilling, the research that followed was depressing and the second viewing at the festival was saddening. In all, several evenings well-spent.

Released in 2014, the muiltiple-award-winning film presents a disturbing picture of the world's favourite potential trade partner: China. It also raises serious questions about our collective complicity — a turning-of-the-eyes away from a program of mass murder within China's health care system, where thousands of prisoners of conscience are harvested every year, and their organs sold to “transplant tourists.”

While the world's developed countries have years-long wait times for patients needing a new liver, kidneys, corneas, or a heart, for $30,000 and up, you can get replacement parts in China in a couple of weeks. China has no functioning organ-donor registration system, but somehow they can find you a tissue match, from a living donor, within a few days.

As the movie heartlessly points out, the donors are not willing— they are pulled from a prison system that houses tens of thousands of mostly Falun Gong religious practitioners. Uighurs, Muslims, Christians and criminals bound for execution round out the roster, but the overwhelming harvest is of Falun Gong believers.

It's a billion-dollar industry which could not exist in this scale in any other country without global attention and outrage. But — because it's China — trade delegations turn a blind eye, looking more to profits in the world's second-largest economy.

The movie follows a report compiled in 2006/07 by former MP and secretary of state David Kilgour, and David Matas, a respected immigration and human rights lawyer. Their efforts won them a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2010, and the ongoing enmity of China.

One question that immediately comes to mind on seeing the film is: why hasn't the world heard about this? I like to think of myself as reasonably informed, but I had no idea this gruesome industry existed in China and I doubt many others of general society were that much ahead of me.

While by no means a well-kept secret, why hasn't this issue come to wider discussion?

Another question: Why have there been no international sanctions for what is by any definition a crime against humanity?

In 2009, Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskj introduced a private members bill making it illegal for Canadians to get a transplant abroad if the organ was taken from an unwilling donor. I couldn't find any evidence that bill ever passed.

Should such law ever pass, a Canadian discovered to have travelled to buy a kidney or a heart could be prosecuted as a participant in a murder.

Kilgour and Matas say we should go further. They want the names of all the doctors and nurses in all the hospitals in China that annually kill thousands of people in order to sell their organs, so we can prosecute them in an international court.

It's no less a crime against humanity than the Holocaust, and indeed, Matas and Kilgour draw parallels. First, you demonize and dehumanize the victims, as was done in pre-war Europe, or in intertribal conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Then, you have people simply remain silent about atrocities.

Wrzesnewskj, who has proposed and supported a wide variety of human rights causes over the years, particularly in the Ukraine, himself trod lightly on the Chinese tiger's tail.

He said that although Canadians benefit from trade with China, and that we want even more trade in the future, “it does not exonerate us for addressing the issue of organ transplantation in the People's Republic of China.” Well, yes, but . . .

He warned against “trusting a country that would engage in this sort of horrific crime against its own people.” Do feel warned?

I would suggest that in any country other than China, such a program of mass-murder-for-profit would result in global trade sanctions, if not military invasion.

And once you know about this, a share of the responsibility falls on you.