Conservative MP Garnett Genuis announced Tuesday he will try and bring back to life a Liberal bill banning Canadians from participating in international organ trafficking.

Genuis, also the opposition critic for international human rights and religious freedom, said in a press conference at the National Press Theatre that he will reintroduce C-561, which was brought before the last Parliament by former human rights advocate and Liberal MP Irwin Cotler but died on the order paper after first reading when the writ dropped.

The private member’s bill would seek to create criminal penalties for those in Canada or abroad who “knowingly acquire or trade in human organs that have been removed without donor consent or for financial gain.” It also would amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to make those who engage in organ trafficking ineligible to come to Canada.

“In Canada right now, there is no law to prevent Canadians from going abroad, acquiring an organ which they know or should know was taken without proper consent, and then coming back. This is a gaping hole, a case where the law has not kept up with emerging realities,” Genuis said.

A report released last year by a team that includes two prominent Canadian human rights activists estimated — based on hospital records, media reports and statements made by doctors — that there are between 60,000 and 100,000 transplants of organs each year, many of them obtained by force from prisoners of conscience, including Falun Gong practitioners and Tibetans.

Although Chinese officials have said the practice of forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners ended in 2015, cases such as that of a Canadian who received a kidney last summer in China after waiting three days have raised doubts about whether that is really the case.

Former Liberal MP David Kilgour, also one of the authors of the 2016 report, stood beside Genuis Tuesday morning along with Anastasia Lin, the former Miss World Canada 2015 and a critic of China’s human rights violations.

Kilgour said existing laws in Canada that forbid sex tourism set a precedent for a bill such as C-561, and that the government should be willing to do the same thing for this issue.

“We have a sex tourism bill in this country that makes it an offence for a Canadian to go … outside of Canada to do something like that,” he said. “Extraterritoriality is what does it, and we should do the same for organ trafficking.”

While Cotler, who originally wrote the bill, did not attend the press conference, Genuis said the two have spoken and that he has Cotler’s full support in trying to revive the bill.

“I’m simply trying to take the football the rest of the way,” he said.