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Thursday, October 31, 2013

Call it Human Trafficking or Human Junking—The Result Is the Same


 By Judy Brown

The United Nations’ latest report on human trafficking should drive fear into our hearts and souls. But what exactly is this crime?

According to the United Nations, the problem centers on the sexual exploitation of women and girls. The report was scoured in an effort to discover whether or not the United Nations was also tracking the trafficking in human organs and fetal tissue, but sadly neither of those topics is addressed. It has been four years since those topics were analyzed, and yet the problem continues. In fact, it is growing.

The phenomenon of “transplant tourism,” where people travel to the developing world to “purchase” kidneys and livers, has been discussed for a number of years, and some countries (such as Kuwait and Pakistan) have very loose legal standards regarding this practice. The practice of trafficking humans specifically for organ harvesting is still relatively new to law enforcement, requiring heightened awareness in the international legal community. “According to the World Health Organisation, as many as 7,000 kidneys are illegally obtained by traffickers each year around the world.” The most recent case occurred in Great Britain and involved a young girl who was brought in from Somalia with the intention of removing her organs and selling them to those who were desperate for a transplant.

continue reading at http://www.all.org/article


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