Sale and Display of Human Body Parts

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome, who made an extremely powerful and obviously expert speech. I will come back to her point about the chance of global leadership here. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, for securing this debate and apologise for missing the first few seconds of his speech—I will get my printer sorted out one day.

It is disappointing that there are so few speakers in this debate. In the Chamber, they have just finished a debate on the UK’s global position, and I had to drop out of that to be able to take part in this debate. But what we are debating here is important not just as a moral or a legal issue; it is an issue of major importance to the UK’s standing and place in the world and to the way we are regarded by particularly significant parts of the world—parts that it is crucial to work with to defend human rights and the rule of law when major global players seek instead to impose the rule of might and the cynical interests of corporations over the well-being of the human and more-than-human world.

I feel it is important to declare my own position here. I come from a white settler background in Australia, and I grew up on unceded lands that were stolen from the Aboriginal people. My speech will focus particularly on public ownership of human remains—the noble Baroness, Lady Black, already covered private ownership very well. In acknowledging my Australian origins, I will begin with a single tale—it is just one, and there are many more—of the genocide with which white settlers established themselves on the Australian continent. It is a story of one man and of barbarous settler behaviour.

On the land of the Bunuba people in what is now Western Australia, Jandamarra became a famous leader of the indigenous resistance. For three years, he was hunted by settlers and police, until in 1897, when he was aged about 24, he was cornered by the police, shot and killed, and his body was beheaded. His skull was sent as a colonial trophy to a private museum in a gun factory in Birmingham. The factory was demolished in the 1960s and Jandamarra’s skull has disappeared. Bunuba elders and researchers continue to this day to search for that skull. His story is very important to indigenous people and other people in Australia. It was first put on stage as a play at the 2008 Perth International Arts Festival and, more recently, it was staged with the Bunuba people by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. That is my telling of an indigenous story.

I also want to put on the record the words of another indigenous leader from another continent, with another coloniser: Mnyaka Sururu Mboro. Speaking for his ancestors, in Berlin, last year, he opened a symposium on colonial human remains with these words:

“Free us from the museums. Free us from the basements where they spray us now and then with disinfectant. Free us from the universities, from the clinics where they keep us on the shelves with the skulls of monkeys, gorillas and orangutans. Free us from the depots where we cannot breathe. Bring us back home and rest us in peace forever”.


At the conference where those words were said, he also told a story told to him by his grandmother about an acacia tree where she, with hundreds of others, was forced in 1900 to witness the hangings of 19 regional leaders, among them Mangi Meli. He was regarded as the most senior, so he was the last to die. After he was hanged, the Germans chopped off Mangi Meli’s head and took it for their colonial collections. There is no record of it after that.

Two different colonised nations, two different awful colonial powers, two remarkably similar stories. There is a huge issue there, which has already been well covered by the noble Lord, Lord Boateng. He focused this debate on remains such as those of indigenous peoples, and I note that the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations has said that it should become an offence to sell ancestral remains or put them on public display without consent, and the noble Lord, Lord Boateng set out some other legal steps that should also be taken. The APPG rightly says that that would be a modest form of reparation for past wrongs—the kind of wrongs that I was telling the tale of—together with the return of the remains, whenever possible, with appropriate treatment by the communities from which they were taken.

Rightly, the APPG also points to the issue of Egyptian mummies. Perhaps, until we heard the speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Black, we might have thought that we had made some progress since the days when mummies were ground up for medicines or even to colour paint. There was a colour of paint called Mummy Brown, made from the flesh of mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh, from the mid-18th century into the 20th century.

It is worth noting that last year the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney—I declare an interest as it is one of my former sites of study—decided to remove fragments of mummies from public display, and has been seeking to rename its so-called mummy room to something more respectful. They removed a mummified foot that had been donated in an old biscuit tin, the preserved feet and partial shins of a child, a partially bandaged adult head and a mummified hand that had been donated in a separate biscuit tin. As the curator there said, the ancient Egyptians are not around as a people today to object to this disrespectful treatment, but that does not mean that we should not look more broadly than just at those remains for whom there are identifiable peoples who are still able to speak for them, such as the voice I quoted from Berlin. It is not just about those remains; we should be thinking about all remains.

As I started off by saying, this is a geopolitical issue and an issue of reparations. Most foundationally of all, it is an issue about what kind of society we want to be. It is not about the remains at all; it is about us and what we are like. If we are going to be respectful of human life of the past, the present and the future; what is in our museums; what our children visit and view; what our scholars study; and how they are presented with the past, that has an impact on the nature of our society today. We often hear talk about being world-leading. If we were to take the steps outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, and the noble Baroness, Lady Black, we would be world-leading and we would also be taking steps to improve our own society.