The House passed a bipartisan bill on Wednesday evening to impose sanctions on individuals engaged in forced organ harvesting or human trafficking for the purpose of organ harvesting, explicitly targeting China for its inhumane practices against ethnic and religious minorities.

The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025, which was considered among a flurry of other legislation from the House Foreign Affairs committee in floor debates on Monday in the context of relations with China, passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, 406-1.

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Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), chairman of the Foreign Affairs committee, said during floor debates over the bill that “the United States has to lead with moral clarity” on this issue.

“We have to send an unmistakable message,” said Mast. “The human body is not a currency. It’s not a commodity. It’s never for sale. Forced organ harvesting is pure evil, and if we don’t act we are considered complicit.”

Experts have warned since 2014 that incarcerated prisoners of conscience, particularly Muslim Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and Christians, have been executed on massive scales to collect organs for transplants. 

There have also been more recent scientific reports indicating that a certain number of organ harvesting victims in China were alive while their organs were harvested, a practice dubbed “execution by organ procurement.”

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), author of the bill, cited international human rights researcher Ethan Guttman’s findings that, as of 2018, between 25,000 and 50,000 individuals of ethnic and religious minorities were victims of organ harvesting each year as of 2018. 

Taking the low estimate, that’s roughly 175,000 people between 2014 and 2018, Smith said in a speech on the House floor Monday.

Rushan Abbas of the Campaign for Uyghurs, standing alongside Smith on Wednesday at an event on Capitol Hill promoting the bill, said that the Chinese Communist Party is waging a “full-fledge, active genocide of Uyghurs and Falun Gong practitioners.” 

“It’s not enough that Uyghur women are forcibly sterilized, erasing future generations,” said Abbas. “It’s not enough that Uyghurs are enslaved in forced labor camps to make profit for global corporations. They are also harvesting our people’s organs, harvesting Uyghur Muslims organs, and calling it ‘halal organs.'” 

The bill would impose civil penalties of up to $250,000 and criminal penalties of a fine up to $1 million and up to 20 years in prison for anyone suspected of human trafficking for organ harvesting, as well as sanctions on foreign nationals engaged in the practice. 

The sanctions in the legislation would block and prohibit all transactions in property and interest in the United States for those suspected to be involved in forced organ harvesting, as well as make any such individuals ineligible to enter the U.S. or receive a visa.

“State-sponsored forced organ harvesting is a big business for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party,” Smith said. “And we will not rest, we cannot rest until we stop it.” 

The House passed a version of the same bill, also championed by Smith, in 2023 on a sweeping bipartisan basis. It was not taken up by the Senate Foreign Affairs committee at the time.

Only two members of Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), voted against the bill in 2023. 

In addition to imposing sanctions, the bill would require the State Department to strengthen its reporting of human trafficking for organ harvesting in its annual Trafficking in Persons report. 

The State Department’s human trafficking report for 2024 characterized the practice as “one of the least reported and least understood forms of trafficking – but one that experts believe may be growing.

Last year’s report also cites a 2021 United Nations human rights report that forced organ harvesting in China is increasing for individuals of ethnic or religious minorities held in detention, often without any explained reason for their arrest.

Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D-MD), a freshman representative on the foreign affairs committee who spoke in Democrat support of the bill, said the legislation is “a strong and important step forward” in determining this scale of the international problem.

“We know that organ harvesting has been a problem in different places around the globe. We don’t know yet the full extent of the problem, and it’s certainly a practice that is difficult to detect and track,” Olszewiski said, adding that the bill will eventually “inform Congress so that we can ensure the US can respond appropriately.”

Olszewiski did say, however, that he is concerned that the Trump administration’s reorganization of the State Department would inevitably “gut the funding and experts working to address these crimes, giving the PRC and others a pass.” 

Dean Baxendale, CEO of the China Democracy Foundation, spoke alongside Smith on Capitol Hill on Wednesday in support of the bill, calling for worldwide action to stop China from continuing forced organ harvesting. 

“This is not an American problem,” said Baxendale. “This is a global problem where governments around the world need to come together and actually work on legislation that takes on the CCP in a serious way, penalizes them, and puts people in jail if they decide to come to our countries.”

The bill is expected to go to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.