(Beijing) China plans to change organ donation rules to attract new donors, country faces shortage since ban in 2015 levies on death row inmates executed.
France Media Agency
The bill published by the Ministry of Health, and subject to public opinion until the end of July, provides in particular for the possibility of donating organs from deceased relatives.
It also makes it illegal to harvest organs from minors, in order to combat the abduction of children for this purpose.
This law should help put an end to a shortage since China stopped in 2015 the controversial practice of organ harvesting from people executed after a death sentence.
It is not certain, however, that habits change. Because Chinese tradition has it that a dead person is buried without mutilation, and very few Chinese people accept organ harvesting.
"The (draft) law does not introduce the idea of implied consent, where any person, unless otherwise advised, is presumed to agree to the removal of his organs," said Wang Bing, a lawyer based in Beijing and specialized in medical affairs.
"It would be the only way to fight the taboo" around the integrity of the body, he believes.
The bill published Wednesday provides for sanctions for individuals and institutions involved in organ trafficking: fines may amount to 10 once the profits have been made and the doctors may be suspended.
"Sentences already exist, but hospitals continue [...] to perform a large number of transplants without it being known where the organs come from," said Matthew Robertson, a researcher at Australian National University, specializing in medical errors in China.
The Asian country even practiced a "systematic falsification" of data on organ donation, according to a study published in November in the journal BMC Medical Ethics and which covered the period 2010 - 2016.
Limited, the number of deceased voluntary donors has however increased in a decade in China. It went from 34 (in 2010) to 6316 (in 2018), according to the government body responsible for the allocation of organs.
China is regularly accused by members of the Falun Gong sect, banned in the Asian country, of carrying out forced organ harvesting from its imprisoned followers. Beijing has always firmly denied these accusations.
