The drugmaker received the prizes at the Public Eye Awards in Davos, Switzerland, for conducting research on transplant patients in China without knowing the origin of the organs donated. The honors are presented each year on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, Swissinfo reports.

It was “highly likely” that some of the organs used in a Roche study in China were taken from executed prisoners, the source of 90 per cent of all transplanted organs in the country, according to the award organizers, the Berne Declaration and Greenpeace Switzerland. Roche is testing the effectiveness of Cellcept, which weakens the immune system so a transplanted organ can be accepted, on hundreds of kidney and liver transplant patients.

The Public Eye Awards presenter, German actress Julia Jentsch, said Roche could not exclude the possibility that some organs used in its clinical trials come from executed prisoners, according to Swissinfo. This would contradict ethical principles and international norms such as those set out by the World Health Organization, the Berne Declaration said.

A Roche spokeswoman told the AFP news agency that it did not have the right to know the origins of the organs used, but that the company was “working to improve the situation” in the hope that the Chinese authorities would conform to these standards. The WHO’s principles on organ transplantation call for transparency regarding organ donations as well as traceability of the origin of the transplanted organs.

The Transplantation Society, an international organisation which draws up guidelines on best practices and ethics, is opposed to recovering organs from executed prisoners. “Because of the restrictions in liberty in a prison environment it is unlikely that prisoners are truly free to make independent decisions and thus an autonomous informed consent for donation cannot be obtained,” the society says on its website.

“The drug has been on the market for years, which begs the question why it must now be tested on Chinese,” Arne Schwarz, a human rights expert on China, tells swissinfo.ch. He conducted his Roche-China research on behalf of the Berne Declaration and presumes the company is doing so for marketing purposes, so its product becomes better known among Chinese transplantation specialists.

Schwarz said he happened upon the fact that organs removed from prisoners were being used in transplantations while travelling in China. NGOs have been critical of China’s transplantation practices since 2006, Swissinfo writes.