Exhibition draws controversy

REBECA KUROPATWA

Bodies ... The Exhibition drew 100,000 visitors to the MTS Centre Exhibition Hall in Winnipeg during its several-month run. Critics of the exhibit’s display of preserved and dissected cadavers in life-like poses claim that the bodies might be those of Chinese political prisoners or members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, who are being persecuted in China.

For several years now, exhibitions of human cadavers have been shown in science museums and other venues throughout North America. They feature solidified corpses through a process called “plastination.” According to publicized reports, Dr. Gunther von Hagens, plastination inventor and the man behind the Body Worlds exhibitions, maintains that every body displayed in Body Worlds originated from a willing European or American donor. Donors are said to have paid to have their bodies sent to the doctor’s Institute for Plastination, along with the necessary paperwork. The bodies are then to be used for displays or sold to medical schools, with each plastinated cadaver made anonymous for privacy protection.

The process is less clear with Bodies ... The Exhibition, a competitor of Body Worlds. On its website, the exhibit’s organizer, Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions, Inc., states, “The full-body specimens are persons who lived in China and died from natural causes. After the bodies were unclaimed at death, pursuant to Chinese law, they were ultimately delivered to a medical school for education and research. Where known, information about the identities, medical histories and causes of death is kept strictly confidential.”

However, on the New York Bodies exhibit’s site, there is also a disclaimer: “This exhibit displays human remains of Chinese citizens or residents which were originally received by the Chinese Bureau of Police. The Chinese Bureau of Police may receive bodies from Chinese prisons. Premier cannot independently verify that the human remains you are viewing are not those of persons who were incarcerated in Chinese prisons.... With respect to the human parts, organs, fetuses and embryos you are viewing, Premier relies solely on the representations of its Chinese partners and cannot independently verify that they do not belong to persons executed while incarcerated in Chinese prisons.”

Winnipeg human rights lawyer David Matas attempted to have the Manitoba government seize the cadavers from Premier Exhibitions, Inc. In an open letter to the Hon. Theresa Oswald, Manitoba minister of health, he wrote, “The Manitoba Anatomy Act requires anyone who wants to take a body out of the province for ‘scientific instruction’ to get the permission of the minister of health.

“The bodies in Bodies ... The Exhibition are, as that term is used in the Anatomy Act, unclaimed bodies. The only person entitled to claim a body under the act is a preferred person. ‘Preferred person’ is a defined term in the act. A preferred person is either a relative, an executor or a representative of Last Post Fund. The organizers of Bodies ... The Exhibition are none of these.”

Because the government claimed that it had no jurisdiction on which to act, Matas and fellow lawyer Norman Boudreau, representing the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China, went to court in another unsuccessful attempt to have the cadavers seized before the exhibit, which started in September, left the city on Jan. 16. As of press time, the case was to continue nonetheless, since the ruling would help determine what the government could do in similar situations in the future.

Matas contends that any Chinese government-provided specimens should be considered suspect. He and David Kilgour released a report in July 2006 (updated in January 2007) and published a book (Bloody Harvest) in November 2009 in which they concluded that Falun Gong practitioners have been killed in China in the tens of thousands so that their organs could be sold to transplant patients.

“Falun Gong, which started in 1992, is a modernized blending of the Chinese exercise, Buddhist and Taoist traditions,” said Matas. “The Communist party and then the government in 1999 banned Falun Gong because its spreading popularity led the party to fear the maintenance of its ideological supremacy. Those who persisted in the practice and refused to recant, even after torture, disappeared into Chinese detention.

“Chinese Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu in November 2006 said, ‘Apart from a small portion of traffic victims, most of the organs from cadavers are from executed prisoners.’ He stated in August 2009 that executed prisoners ‘are definitely not a proper source for organ transplants.’

“The reason such sourcing is improper is that consent, even if given, is not truly voluntary in such a coercive setting.”

According to Matas, transplant tourism – selling organs for transplants to foreigners – is a booming business for hospitals, doctors and prisons in China.

“The dispute David Kilgour and I have with the government of China is not over whether prisoners are being killed for their organs, but only over which sorts of prisoners are being killed for their organs,” said Matas. “If Chinese prisons are eager to make money out of the sale of the organs of prisoners for transplants, they would be equally eager to make money out of plastination of the bodies of prisoners, indeed likely, that they are also the sources of bodies for plastination.”

Other local critics of Bodies included a group of University of Manitoba students, who collected 1,000 signatures on a petition last fall, which asked city hall to shut the exhibit down before its planned closing date, but the city said it had no jurisdiction to do so.

As well, retired teacher David Skinner complained to the Winnipeg Police Service that the exhibit is a crime, as he believes that it violates Section 182 of Canada’s Criminal Code by committing an indignity to human remains. The law states: “Everyone who improperly or indecently interferes with or offers any indignity to a dead human body or human remains, whether buried or not, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.”

Skinner said, “I know some people think it [the exhibition] is wonderful. But when there were public hangings, people liked to go to them.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

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