Speech by David Kilgour at the Torch Lighting Ceremony in Athens on August 9, 2007

The following speech was presented by former Canadian MP David Kilgour at the launching of the Human Rights Torch Relay in Athens, Greece on August 9, 2007. In the coming year, the Human Rights Torch will be carried to cities all over the world in an attempt to raise awareness of the crimes against humanity being perpetrated by the CCP in China.

Independent international organizations and observers have been saying for several years that human rights abuses by the government of China are worsening as August, 2008 approaches, not improving as it promised in its successful bid to win the right to host the games.

David Matas and I completed the revised edition of an independent study earlier this year, which concluded to our horror that since 1999 the government of China and its agencies in numerous regions of the country have put to death a large but unknown number of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience (The investigation report is available in seventeen languages at organharvestinvestigation.net). Their vital organs, including kidneys, livers and corneas, were seized involuntarily for sale at high prices and to foreigners, who normally face long waits for voluntary donations of such organs in their home countries.

This is absolutely not what we expect from any government hosting the Olympics.

Should not the importance of saving human lives--in this case an exercise-spiritual community whose numbers were estimated by a department of the government of China to be in the 70 million range in the late 1990s--override any sporting event, including even the 2008 summer Olympics?

If the killing of Falun Gong practitioners across China does not stop immediately--and we'll all know if it does--people of goodwill everywhere should call for a boycott of the Bloody Harvest Games, or the Genocide Olympics as Mia Farrow termed them in connection with the government of China's role in Darfur.

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