Organ trafficking is an international criminal industry and it’s on the increase, driven by global conflict, rising incidence rates of diabetes and cancer and an ageing population. Like most illegal trade, resources are funnelled from lower socioeconomic regions to more affluent parts of the world, so that almost every global region is implicated in the trade in some way - be it as a source, transit or destination country.

Covered in this Briefing Note:

With the World Cup in Qatar, the war in Ukraine and various scandals around forced labour, sexual exploitation or underpayment of wages in the supply chains of companies - including major tea companies - hitting the headlines in the last year or two, the prevalence of modern slavery and human trafficking (MSHT) globally is becoming more widely acknowledged. Forced labour, child trafficking and sexual exploitation are perhaps the most frequently discussed aspects of the trade in human beings: individuals brutally utilised for the services they can provide and the physical goods they can produce. But what about the human body as a physical product in and of itself; its commodification as a set of constituent parts that can be sold off in chunks?

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