Bodies on the Red Market: Organ Trafficking as a Human Rights Concern

BY RAHMI ELAHJJI

One day while playing outside in China’s north-central Shanxin province, six-year-old Xiao Binbin was abducted from the front of his house and taken to a field outside of town where his eyes were harvested. Xiao’s story is not uncommon for people living in developing countries, yet the issue of organ harvesting is not one that attracts a great amount of media attention. In fact, CNN’s Asia Bureau didn’t pick up this story until over a week after local Chinese media outlets first reported it. Only a handful of human rights groups actively advocate against organ trafficking, while the mainstream media has turned a blind eye toward the issue.

Organ trafficking overwhelmingly targets suppressed populations. For example, China has a long history of involuntary organ harvesting from executed prisoners, viewing prisoners’ forced donations as a pathway to their redemption and a fulfillment of some kind of debt to society. In response to widespread international criticism, the Chinese government has announced that it will terminate this program in 2014, but there exist countless other examples of similar exploitation that continues unaddressed.

The notion of organ trafficking as a socioeconomic phenomenon (as a relationship between haves and have-notes) is advanced by the idea of “transplant tourism.” A comprehensive treatment of this phenomenon can be found in Scott Carney’s 2011 book, The Red Market. Carney narrates a time when he traveled to India after the 2004 tsunami and observed organ harvesting first-hand inside a refugee camp outside of New Dehli. Carney observed that organ traffickers preyed upon the desperation of the refugees, who could not afford medical treatment or who were promised the opportunity to be smuggled to a “better place.” Human rights groups classify victims of organ harvesting in three categories: individuals who are abducted solely for the purpose of their organs, individuals who are coerced into voluntarily donating organs by promise of money, and individuals who undergo unrelated procedures whose organs are harvested without their consent.

The similarity in all these circumstances, Carney notes, is that organ trafficking almost always benefits a richer person, and often someone of a different nationality than their donor. A study performed by the Coalition for Organ Failure Solutions found that the majority of organ donors are from developing countries, whereas the recipients of those organs are generally from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Additionally, the study also found that the typical annual income of an organ donor in those developing countries is $460, while the typical organ recipient was found to have an annual income of $53,000.

Organ theft is especially prevalent in areas of conflict, where refugees are driven into desperate circumstances. Organ theft was a huge phenomenon during the Kosovo War of the late 1990’s. In what is perhaps a testament to the legal and political complexities surrounding organ theft, unanswered questions still remain about the extent to which officers in the Kosovo Liberation Army – some of whom now hold elevated political positions – participated in the black market organ trade. In a contemporary case still ongoing, refugees from Eritrea searching for asylum are being exploited and in some cases robbed of organs. These refugees are smuggled from middleman to middleman as they travel through Sudan all the way to the Sinai Peninsula. Once they reach the Sinai, the relatives of these refugees are extorted into paying a ransom for their loved ones; if their relatives cannot pay, refugees are subjected to various types of torture and will often have their organs harvested. From the cases of Kosovo and Eritrea, it is clear that conflict and despotic government both facilitate organ trafficking. Thus we should begin to ask the question: what if this is happening in Syria as well?

The debate is currently raging in Congress concerns the type of military or diplomatic intervention the US should pursue in Syria. A “red line,” as Obama calls it, was crossed when the Assad regime allegedly used sarin gas on its people. However, undocumented and unconfirmed reports have been streaming in concerning mass amounts of organ harvesting in Syrian refugee camps. Foreign nationals from France, Turkey, and the United States have been implicated in this trade. However, between talks of military strikes and diplomatic interventions, there is little discussion of a targeted humanitarian campaign to address this and other human rights issues.

While socioeconomic stratification on a global scale is a clear driver of this traffic, the issue of organ harvesting transcends economics into complex moral ambiguities. Oftentimes, the same “victims” whom we believe are being exploited are actually voluntary agents. Clearly, desperation on the part of both the donors and recipients causes both classes of individuals to pursue extreme avenues toward survival.

Perhaps the reason why the mainstream media has avoided the issue in recent years is because it forces us as a society to ask the questions of ourselves that we really do not want to ask. The most important of these questions is what the best way to solve this global problem is – a question that has yet to be answered.