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Organ theft is the practice of stealing people's organs via surgery while they are under the influence of drugs, or once the person is dead, when the organs can be illicitly removed and then used for further purposes such as transplants or sold on the black market.

Emergence of Organ Theft

The international organ theft have become a multi-national dollar business throughout the world where organs are being harvested without informed consent from both live and dead individuals. Organ theft is mainly prevalent in developing countries due to low government enforcements and human right policies.

Evidence for the phenomenon

The practice is occasionally advanced as a theory into mysterious disappearances or murders, and is then advanced by sensationalist news reports, followed by word-of-mouth promotion as an urban legend.

Its semicredible basis, in fact, is the extreme difficulty with which organs can be preserved postmortem (usually requiring a braindead but still functionally alive patient), and the long waiting lists for available organs. There has never been sufficient evidence, however, to suggest that the practice has ever occurred on an organized basis.

This has not prevented its repeated depiction in horror movies and fiction novels.

Organ theft events

It has been confirmed that the organs of a number of prisoners in China were taken for transplant after their executions (though ostensibly with their forced permission) on a for-profit basis, often to foreign nationals. The Chinese authoritarian justice system is alleged to work very quickly for those sentenced to death, not allowing significant time for appeals. This has led to allegations that the entire justice system has been corrupted by a government approved system of organ theft. Among those making this claim are Harry Wu and the Laogai Research Foundation. Until 2006, the Chinese government did not have a specific law in place outlawing the acquisition of organs without express consent. However, even with this new statute, other conflicting statutes remain, including that which allows State prisons to use prisoners in whatever way it deems beneficial to the State.

In July 2006, former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour, and Human Rights Lawyer David Matas, published a report concluding that "...large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners are victims of systematic organ harvesting, whilst still alive..."

In The Hunt: Me and War criminals, Carla Del Ponte claims that Kosovo Albanians smuggled human organs of kidnapped Serbs after the Kosovo war ended in 1999.

Organ sale

Although illegal in most countries, the sale of organs is common. Accurate statistics are hard to come by, but in March 2007, one estimate was that 5 to 10% of the world's kidney transplants involved compensation. Although many reports that this trade has involved coercion or kidnapping (thus becoming organ theft) have turned out to be just rumors, some cases have involved theft, for example the 2008 kidney ring run by doctor Amit Kumar in India.

Another example is from Brazil, where a woman had a routine ovarian cyst surgery but later realized that one of her kidneys had disappeared during her operation. This had occured without her knowledge when she realized after she went for a checkup at a different location than the hospital that she had her surgery. The hospital refused to provide her with any information or justification for her organ theft that had taken place during her surgery. These types of routine acts of theft are done for organ trafficking that can be later sold to the highest bid.

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