‘This lab has actively supported the CCP’s campaign of genocide through biometric data harvesting and forensic tracking,’ Sen. Rick Scott said.
A bicameral group of Republican lawmakers has proposed legislation to reinstate a Chinese forensic police institute on a trade sanctions list, accusing the agency of being involved in human rights violations perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The legislation, called the Confronting CCP Human Rights Abusers Act, was introduced on May 15. The Senate bill (S 1772) was led by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and cosponsored by Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), while the House bill (HR 3461) was led by Reps. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) and John Moolenaar (R-Mich.).
If enacted, the legislation would redesignate the CCP’s Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science (IFS) on the Commerce Department’s entity list. The first Trump administration placed the institute on the list in 2020 over alleged abuses against Uyghurs and other minority groups in China’s far-eastern region of Xinjiang.
The Biden administration removed IFS from the sanctions list in November 2023 in a deal to get the Chinese regime to do more to halt its outflow of fentanyl precursors.
“The Chinese Communist Party’s Institute of Forensic Science plays a key role in the regime’s surveillance state, directly enabling mass internment, forced labor, and high-tech oppression of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities,” Scott said in a statement on May 15.
“This lab has actively supported the CCP’s campaign of genocide through biometric data harvesting and forensic tracking and rightly earned its spot on the Entity List years ago.
“Reinstating it on the Entity List is a critical move to stop American technology from aiding Communist China’s crimes.”
In a post on the social media platform X in November 2023, Germany-based advocacy group World Uyghur Congress said that IFS “possesses involuntary collected DNA from millions of Uyghurs and Tibetans.”
The Trump and Biden administrations both formally declared the Chinese regime’s treatment of the Uyghur minority ethnic group as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”
“We must continue to hold the Chinese Communist Party Institute of Forensic Science accountable for its abusive and genocidal actions against its own people,” Blackburn said in a May 15 statement.
Blackburn added that placing the institute back on the sanctions list would affirm “the United States’ resolve to hold human rights violators accountable.”
The bill states that two aliases of the institute, the Forensic Identification Center and the Material Identification Center, would also be added to the sanctions list.
“The Chinese Communist Party is as evil as evil gets—and its Institute of Forensic Science is no exception. From genocide and espionage to forced organ harvesting, this regime is no friend to the United States,” Ogles said in a May 15 statement.
In 2019, the China Tribunal in London concluded that the CCP had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years “on a substantial scale,” with Falun Gong practitioners being the “principal source” of human organs.
The CCP has been persecuting Falun Gong for more than two decades, subjecting its practitioners to forced labor, imprisonment, torture, and other inhuman treatments. Many practitioners have died under the regime’s brutal tactics, while others have been killed for their organs.
On May 7, the House passed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (HR 1503) by a vote of 406–1. If enacted, the legislation would sanction anyone implicated in the abuse, including revoking visas and blocking U.S. property transactions. Additionally, individuals who willfully engage in the act could face a criminal penalty of up to $1 million in fines and 20 years in prison.