At an organ trafficking summit at the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences this week, Wang Haibo said global collaboration could start with sharing information and developing a coding system.

Wang, who is head of the China Organ Transplant Response System, suggested China's organ trading measures could be introduced at the World Health Organization (WHO).

China has been working on outlawing illegal organ trading for about a decade.

It criminalised unauthorised organ trading in 2011. The death penalty can be imposed on offenders in severe cases.

In 2015, China banned the use of organs from executed prisoners.

At the same time, it made voluntary donation the only legitimate source of transplanted organs.

In the 10 years from 2007 to 2017, a joint task force from China's top health and public security authorities arrested about 220 people for participating in organ trafficking.

Those arrested included 60 medical staff.

The task force also rescued about 100 victims during the same period.

Wang told the summit that China could also launch an alert system at customs checkpoints.

The system would notify authorities when foreign patients waiting for organ transplants enter China.

By law, no foreigners are allowed to receive organs from deceased donors in China.

WHO's adviser on organ transplants, Jose Nunez, says China's preventative measures against transplant tourism could work in other countries.

Nunez pointed to China's computerised organ allocation system which he suggested could be promoted, especially in deprived regions.

He said since 2015 China has "made big and great reforms ... and that's what we want to promote, to show that things can be changed,"

Nunez told the conference that WHO expects China to share its transparent and ethical model with other countries.

He noted China has set an example of an organ transplant model with trustworthy government involvement.

This is the second year in a row a Chinese delegate has taken part in a Vatican conference against organ trafficking.

Source

• Xinhuanet
• Global Times
• Image: South China Morning Post

Benedict said that admiring the beauty of other people, cultures and nature, can lead to God and be the occasion of an experience of faith.

"Tourism, together with vacations and free time, is a privileged occasion for physical and spiritual renewal; it facilitates the coming together of people from different cultural backgrounds and offers the opportunity of drawing close to nature and hence opening the way to listening and contemplation, tolerance and peace, dialogue and harmony in the midst of diversity."

However in the same letter he strongly condemned sexual exploitation and the trafficking in human organs, and warned that tourists must not trample on the rights of people, particularly the poor, minors and the handicapped.

Sex tourism, Benedict said, "is one of the most abject of these deviations that devastate morally, psychologically and physically the life of so many persons and families, and sometimes whole communities."

He likewise sounded a similar warning about people trafficking.

"The trafficking of human beings for sexual exploitation or organ harvesting as well as the exploitation of minors, abandoned into the hands of individuals without scruples and undergoing abuse and torture, sadly happen in a context of tourism."

The pontiff urged the Church and anyone involved in pastoral care for tourists to support the goodness involved in tourism, to be alert for these abuses and to oppose them.

Sources

• VIS
• AFP
• Image: 100% NZ Pure