A criminal trial in Kosovo revealing that Canadians are among the illegal recipients of the black market trade in human body parts reveals the extent to which Canada is implicated in this transnational criminal enterprise, which exploits the world's poor and condemned.
No matter how desperate Canadian patients are for a new kidney, they must resist the temptation to buy one abroad.
Canadians who engage in this illegal practice expose themselves to a higher risk of complication and organ failure, are a drain on Canada's health care system - and may burden their conscience with the fact they could end up with the kidney of an executed prisoner.
The latest manifestation of this crime is playing out this week in a courtroom in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, where seven people are accused of luring Russians, Moldovans and Turks with the false promise of payments for their kidneys. Recipients include Canadians, Germans and Israelis. There are allegations that Kosovo's government was involved in a related organ-trafficking operation that harvested kidneys from prisoners.
Though the buying and selling of body parts is illegal in Canada and most countries, it goes on in Kosovo, China, India and Pakistan. From 2000 to 2008 in British Columbia alone, 93 Canadians bought kidneys overseas.
A Swiss human-rights investigator's official report into organ trafficking by the Kosovo Liberation Army concluded that Kosovo's Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, led an organized-crime ring that engaged in the practice in the late 1990s. The report suggests the KLA held Serbs and other prisoners in detention centres in Albania for almost a year after the war with Serbia ended in 1999 and illegally harvested their kidneys. The organs were then shipped to Istanbul, illustrating the often gruesome nature of the trade.
In Canada, there is a chronic shortage of organs, and it is understandable that kidney patients become desperate. Every year, 60 people on the kidney wait list die. But there are other options: A patient can persuade a living donor to give up a kidney, and if it isn't a match, the organ can go to someone else, and the patient can receive an organ from another donor whose intended recipient is also incompatible.
The Canadian Societies of Transplantation and Nephrology are so opposed to the underground trade, they recently adopted a policy allowing doctors to refuse to treat patients who participate in it, people who often suffer serious complications. That - and the very real possibility of receiving a dead prisoner's kidney - should convince Canadians not to engage in the exploitative enterprise.