Combating Atrocity Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend Lord Alton of Liverpool for never having stopped keeping up the pressure on enhancing our awareness of human rights, often at great personal expense to himself and his family. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Collins, for his support going back many years when we first exposed the issue of illegal organ harvesting and transplantation. It is on that topic that I will focus, because it is a despicable side-effect of some of the terrible killings that go on around the world.

In 2024, across the world, it was estimated that 173,727 organs were transplanted overall, 47,000 of which came from deceased donors. Those figures are from international data submitted to the Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation. When you look at Great Britain, the UK, Ireland and the USA, the figures are comprehensive and properly registered. When you look at other countries that we have been discussing today, the data columns are very often blank the whole way down—nothing is declared. There are figures given by China, but I will come on to those in a moment.

The problem has been that the demand for organs has outstripped the supply through legal ethical routes. I declare my interest as a patron in establishing the Commonwealth Tribute to Life through NHS Blood and Transplant, which has been trying to ensure that there are ethical transplant practices across the whole Commonwealth. We have had some success, with memorandums of understanding and a decrease in the sale of organs, particularly kidneys. But it is very hard to get a full picture because of the secret nature of this activity.

Organ harvesting involves illegally removing parts of a body for transplant for commercial gain with or without the victim’s so-called consent. Of course, under modern slavery laws, a victim cannot consent to their own exploitation.

The China Tribunal in 2020, set up by Sir Geoffrey Nice, again with enormous courage, revealed very much of what was going on in China. He found that waiting times were short—days or weeks—in places where voluntary donation systems could not possibly have been providing all the organs that were used and documented the problem of Falun Gong practitioners being targeted since 1999 and the mass detention of people in Xinjiang province with forced medical screenings and biometric analysis. There was direct and indirect evidence of forced organ harvesting. Survivors who managed to escape Chinese custody have provided accounts, including to the British Medical Journal, detailing unconsented practices and very narrow escapes from surgery.

Internationally, most of the victims seem to be men, with about two-thirds of reported cases involving men whose organs have been taken. That is UN data. The victims are poor, uneducated or unemployed. They are often asylum seekers, refugees or from minority backgrounds. Shockingly and surprisingly, north Africa and the Middle East have the highest share of detected victims, as reported by the United States Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for raising the issue of children caught up because, horrifically, children are being trafficked for their organs globally. There are reports of teenage girls having their ovaries harvested unknowingly to be trafficked for profit. Some of the anecdotal reports come out of Nigeria.

However, victims are mostly men, leaving women and girls without a provider for their families. Female spouses become obliged to donate their organs because the man in the family, the breadwinner, is ill or has perhaps died. Adult women have been trafficked, for their ovaries and their eggs.

In Afghanistan in 2023, 459 kidney transplants were documented. However, the United Nations estimated that 59% of the population was in need of life-saving humanitarian aid, so the pressure on people to donate was phenomenal. In 2021, a mother was quoted as saying:

“My children roam on the streets begging … If I don’t sell my kidney, I will be forced to sell my one-year-old daughter”.


More recently, the state has said that it is un-Islamic to undertake any organ transplantation, and it is notable that the latest return, for 2024, to the observatory shows no kidneys. I do not believe that it is a zero; it is just completely hidden.

I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Nye, for highlighting Burma. In Myanmar, young people are removed and killed, and in the morning when their body has been left outside their family’s door, it is often found that they have been opened and seem to have had their organs stripped out. There seem to be fast-track routes through some of the airports for organs to be taken to China for transplantation. What has China’s response been? Beijing initially denied accusations but admitted in 2015 that it had routinely harvested organs from executed death row prisoners. Now the Chinese Government assert that they completely ended that practice in 2015 and that they rely entirely on voluntary citizen donation systems. There is an enormous worry about how so-called consent is obtained.

The United States has the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act to impose property blocking and sanctions. The European Union has passed resolutions requiring member institutions to evaluate aggressively and to sever medical training and research collaboration with such teams. The National Institutes of Health has historically published statements from first-hand witnesses and imposed medical sanctions. I feel that my professional group needs to ensure that the World Medical Association takes this much more seriously because, far too often, healthcare professionals are intimately involved through threats, intimidation and fear for their own family and may possibly be killed if they do not participate in this signal of overwhelming abuse around the world.