Gabrielle M. Etzel and Rachel Schilke
Washington Examiner, May 7, 2025
The House passed a bipartisan bill Wednesday evening to impose sanctions on people engaged in forced organ harvesting or human trafficking for the purpose of organ harvesting, explicitly targeting China for its inhumane practices against ethnic and religious minorities.
The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025, which was considered among a flurry of other bills from the House Foreign Affairs Committee in floor debates on Monday in the context of relations with China, passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, 406-1. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was the sole “no” vote.
Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), chairman of the Foreign Affairs committee, said during floor debates over the bill that “the United States has to lead with moral clarity” on this issue.
“We have to send an unmistakable message,” Mast said. “The human body is not a currency. It’s not a commodity. It’s never for sale. Forced organ harvesting is pure evil, and if we don’t act, we are considered complicit.”
Experts have warned since 2014 that incarcerated prisoners of conscience, particularly Muslim Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and Christians, have been executed on a massive scale to collect organs for transplants.
There have also been more recent scientific reports indicating that a certain number of organ-harvesting victims in China were alive while their organs were harvested, a practice dubbed “execution by organ procurement.”
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), the author of the bill, cited international human rights researcher Ethan Guttman’s findings that, as of 2018, between 25,000 and 50,000 people of ethnic and religious minorities were victims of organ harvesting each year.
Taking the low estimate, that is roughly 175,000 people between 2014 and 2018, Smith said Monday in a speech on the House floor.
Rushan Abbas of the Campaign for Uyghurs, standing alongside Smith on Wednesday at an event on Capitol Hill promoting the bill, said the Chinese Communist Party is waging a “full-fledged, active genocide of Uyghurs and Falun Gong practitioners.”
“It’s not enough that Uyghur women are forcibly sterilized, erasing future generations,” Abbas said. “It’s not enough that Uyghurs are enslaved in forced labor camps to make profit for global corporations. They are also harvesting our people’s organs, harvesting Uyghur Muslims’ organs, and calling it ‘halal organs.'”
The bill would impose civil penalties of up to $250,000 and criminal penalties of a fine up to $1 million and up to 20 years in prison for anyone suspected of human trafficking for organ harvesting, as well as sanctions on foreign nationals engaged in the practice.
The sanctions in the legislation would block and prohibit all transactions in property and interest in the United States for those suspected to be involved in forced organ harvesting, as well as make any such individuals ineligible to enter the U.S. or receive a visa.
“State-sponsored forced organ harvesting is a big business for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party,” Smith said. “And we will not rest, we cannot rest until we stop it.”
The House passed a version of the same bill, also championed by Smith, in 2023 on a sweeping bipartisan basis. The Senate Foreign Affairs Committee did not take it up at the time.
Only two members of Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), voted against the bill in 2023.
In addition to imposing sanctions, the bill would require the State Department to strengthen its reporting of human trafficking for organ harvesting in its annual Trafficking in Persons report.
The State Department’s human trafficking report for 2024 characterized the practice as “one of the least reported and least understood forms of trafficking — but one that experts believe may be growing.”
Last year’s report also cites a 2021 United Nations human rights report that forced organ harvesting in China is increasing for people of ethnic or religious minorities held in detention, often without any explanation for their arrest.
Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D-MD), a freshman representative on the Foreign Affairs Committee who spoke in Democrat support of the bill, said the legislation is “a strong and important step forward” in determining the scale of the international problem.
“We know that organ harvesting has been a problem in different places around the globe. We don’t know yet the full extent of the problem, and it’s certainly a practice that is difficult to detect and track,” Olszewiski said, adding that the bill will eventually “inform Congress so that we can ensure the U.S. can respond appropriately.”
Olszewiski did say, however, that he is concerned that the Trump administration’s reorganization of the State Department would inevitably “gut the funding and experts working to address these crimes, giving [China] and others a pass.”
Dean Baxendale, CEO of the China Democracy Foundation, spoke Wednesday alongside Smith on Capitol Hill in support of the bill, calling for worldwide action to stop China from continuing forced organ harvesting.
“This is not an American problem,” Baxendale said. “This is a global problem where governments around the world need to come together and actually work on legislation that takes on the CCP in a serious way, penalizes them, and puts people in jail if they decide to come to our countries.”
The bill is expected to go to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.
