China's booming industry of organ transplants from executed death row inmates

According to the China Daily, a total of 86,800 kidney transplants, 14,643 liver transplants, 882 heart and lung transplants and more than 220 transplants of other organs have been carried out in China.

Official estimates indicate that, in fact, 1.5 million Chinese people need organ transplants each year, but only 10,000 operations are performed because of a severe shortage of donors.

After it surfaced that some hospitals have been performing illegal organ surgery for foreigners, the China Daily recently reported that experts estimate that more than 65% of organ donors comes from death row.

Although Chinese regulations stipulate that organs in transplants must be donated on a voluntary basis, death row inmates may feel pressured to become donors, violating personal, religious or cultural beliefs.

"If you're a prisoner and you're about to be executed, you do not have a real choice, especially in a system ... (that) is completely untransparent and notorious for abuses against prisoners, as the Chinese system is.", confirmed Nicholas Bequelin, Asia researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch. In fact, only 130 people have actually pledged to donate officially their organs since 2003.

Qian Jianmin, chief transplant surgeon with the Shanghai Huashan Hospital, also stated that hospitals performing transplants not only treat patients getting organs from executed prisoners, but also have to deal with other levels of government, including the justice department and that corruption can occur during the process. "Some just ignore legal procedures regarding organ donations from executed prisoners and make a fat profit", Huang said.

Vice Minister Huang acknowledged that executed death row inmates "are definitely not a proper source for organ transplants".

In a desperate attempt to reduce its dependency on body parts harvested from executed prisoners, a new donor system has just been put in place, that will link potential donors with recipients and make public a waiting list of patients to increase transparency and fairness in allocating organs.

Amnesty reported that a minimum of 7000 death sentences were handed down in China, which has executed 1718 persons in 2008 alone (72% of the world's total).

In this country where families are not even informed of the actual execution,  could the booming transplant industry be a covert reason to justify the death penalty?