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| A protest with a mock operation in Paris, France, against forced organ harvesting in China |
China - the last country in the world systematically harvesting organs from executed prisoners - is to ban the practice next year according to a senior official.
By mid-2014, all hospitals licensed for transplants must stop using organs from executed prisoners and only use those voluntarily donated and allocated through a fledging national transplant and donor system.
The supply of human organs falls far short of demand in China due in part to a traditional belief that bodies should be buried or cremated intact.
An estimated 300,000 patients are wait-listed every year for organ transplants but only around one in 30 ultimately receives a transplant.
That shortage has driven a trade in illegal organ trafficking.
In 2007, transplants from living donors were banned, except from spouses, blood relatives and adopted or step-family members.
China does not publish the numbers of people it executes, though the World Coalition Against The Death Penalty estimates it was about 4,000 last year.
Officials say the figure is falling.
Courts which oversee executions have been told they are no longer allowed to offer organs to hospitals.
Mr Huang Jiefu, a former deputy health minister and Australian-trained transplant surgeon who is heading China's organ transplant reform said that a fall in executions meant prisoners' organs could no longer be relied on.
"China has meted out fewer and fewer death sentences, so reliance on death-row inmates' donations will become a dead end," he said.
"So we must rely on voluntary donations," he added.
He admitted the problem of an organ black market was not something the country will easily resolve.
"The illegal trade of human organs will be inevitable in Chinese society in the years to come," said Mr Huang.
"The huge demand for organs is one of the causes. As long as there's a gap between supply and demand, illegal organ trafficking won't disappear, but the government will continue to crack down on it," he told Reuters.
Source: RTE News, November 2, 2013
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