LAWS AND CONVENTIONS: HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND ORGAN TRADE
BY: Yash Mourya
INTRODUCTION:
Trafficking is defined as trading, or dealing in illegal objects. Organ trafficking is perhaps the least profiled and understood form of human trafficking. It often involves the intersection of donor, recipient, medical experts and (organized) criminal groups facilitating the trade. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Council of Europe refer to the trafficking in both ways, the removal of organs or tissues (often from cadaver donors), and the trafficking of humans for the very same purpose. The problem of illegal organ trafficking is widespread, although data on the exact scale of the organ market is difficult to obtain, and perhaps a…show more content… As the main focus of the proposed legislation was kidney scams, the panel of doctors in the committee for framing the law were all kidney experts and thus, the Act has largely been framed keeping in view the kidney scams only. Finally the present Act dealing with regulation of organ transplantation called the Transplantation of Human Organs Act (THOA), 1994 has come into existence, it had quite a number of drawbacks in various sections and miserably failed to live up to its expectations on a lot of counts. The 1994 Act did nothing to ensure that hospitals would create protocols for retrieving the full range of retrievable organs that could be donated by the public and transplanted to save lives. The result was a market-driven lucrative focus on the only organ that could be donated by live donor’s viz. kidneys. The provision of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of the USA which legislates in detail on the role of hospitals in organ retrieval from cadavers seems to have been completely overlooked by the