Cadavers exhibition prompts protest

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This article was published 13/11/2010 (5661 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A downtown anatomical extravaganza is coming under fire with critics preparing to march to city hall armed with concerns about the human cadavers posed on Portage Avenue as part of Bodies: The Exhibition.

On Monday morning, a group led by a University of Manitoba student club will present a petition signed by more than 1,000 people to Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz. The petition’s demand: that the city either find proof that Bodies‘ bodies were donated with consent, or shut the exhibit down before its scheduled January close.

“When we started to look into the exhibition, we found it really strange that they had no proof of consent,” said U of M student Judith Cheung, 22, who spent days pounding the pavement outside the Portage Avenue exhibition hall to gather more than 1,000 signatures.

“I do understand the educational value, and we don’t want to take that away from everyone… but it’s important that it raises the public’s attention, so our government will take a look at them and ensure that Canadian ethics are being upheld.”

At issue in this latest controversy is the fact Premier Exhibitions, the company behind the touring display of preserved and dissected cadavers, leases its specimens from the Chinese government. Critics fear some bodies could belong to peaceful prisoners who were tortured or executed, a charge Premier once acknowledged it couldn’t conclusively deny.

The issue hits close to home for Cheung, who chairs the U of M’s Falun Dafa student group. Falun Dafa is also known as Falun Gong, a spiritual movement the Chinese government has brutally crushed since 1999. Journalists, activists and researchers, including Winnipeg human rights lawyer David Matas, have produced extensive documentation showing China has killed imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners and sold their organs, primarily to foreigners.

Phone calls to Premier Exhibitions’ head office were not returned Friday. On its website, the company states the bodies belong to “persons who lived in China and died from natural causes” whose corpses were unclaimed. In an online disclaimer from a previous engagement in New York, Premier says the bodies came indirectly from the Chinese Bureau of Police and could include bodies from Chinese prisons.

“Premier relies solely on the representations of its Chinese partners and cannot independently verify that (the bodies) do not belong to persons executed while incarcerated,” the disclaimer says.

For Cheung and other signatories of the local petition, the uncertainty is chilling. “We have to be really careful when dealing with the Chinese government,” she said. “They say these bodies are unclaimed, but with the organ-harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners, these people are executed and their families are purposefully not contacted.”

Now, Cheung and fellow organizers are hoping to nab even more signatures before they deliver the petition to Katz on Monday at 11 a.m. Efforts to get Bodies: The Exhibition shut down elsewhere have met with occasional success. In New York state, a 2008 investigation by then-attorney general Andrew Cuomo led to a settlement that included a requirement Premier obtain proof that the deceased consented to have their bodies displayed before it would be allowed to return to the state.

Here in Winnipeg, organizers know getting the exhibit closed might be a tall order. But at least the city can have the debate, they agreed. “We’re supposed to be holding ourselves up as a city with the new museum for human rights, and there doesn’t seem to be a response (to Bodies),” co-organizer and U of M professor Cathy Rocke said.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca