Sale and Display of Human Body Parts

Baroness Black of Strome Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Black of Strome (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, for raising this important issue and securing this short debate. I am an anatomist who led a large teaching and research department for 15 years. I am also a forensic anthropologist. So I understand the legislation surrounding human remains, their ownership, their display and the macabre fringe community that finds this subject of interest and value.

The law regarding both the purchase and the sale of human remains is fragmented and remains largely unchallenged until an incident occurs, which is not rare. This weakness is exploited by those who seek financial gain from the sale of the dead. Most human remains are housed in museums or licensed anatomical premises, where they are regulated or have guidelines for a code of conduct, but the legal status regarding those held privately remains ambiguous and open to both commoditisation and exploitation.

If death occurred within the last 100 years, human remains fall within the remit of the Human Tissue Act 2004 —the HTA. Therefore, those who died prior to 1925—in the lifetimes of my grandparents—do not carry such protective legislation. It is also important to note that the HTA requires consent and makes only sale for the purposes of transplantation illegal.

What about those remains that fall outside these restricted boundaries? There is a buoyant market in the sale of body parts from the deceased. In 2012, Etsy led the way by banning the sale of all human remains; eBay followed suit in 2016. Both deem it unacceptable to be responsible for the sale of any part of a human.

What is being bought? Where do these remains come from? Are they people or are they property? In English law, there is no property in a human body. However, if an element of skill or technical process is applied to the remains, they can be classified as an object of art and legally bought or sold—so there is precedent.

In 1998, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales upheld a conviction against an individual who stole anatomical specimens from London’s Royal College of Surgeons on the grounds that the application of skill to create the specimens technically made them property and that, therefore, their removal was a legitimate theft. Is it not ironic that the law recognises the skills but not the propriety of the deceased person who became property?

Real human bones as objects of alleged art can be found for sale mainly online but also in curiosity or Gothic shops, where they have been turned into lamps. Skulls are carved with symbols and images or dentally altered to look like vampires. There is jewellery made out of human teeth and bones. There are skulls with their teeth removed and coffin nails drilled into each cavity. There are human bones turned into pieces for Ouija boards or chess sets, as well as wind chimes made out of human ribs. There are also—I apologise for the image—earrings made out of freeze-dried human foetuses. We are not just talking about the skeletons of adults; these are also the remains of children, babies and foetuses. It is shameful, deeply disrespectful and unacceptable to any decent person.

Where did these remains come from? There is an increase in vandalism of graveyards and forced entry into crypts and mausolea. Twenty-one skulls were stolen from an ossuary in a Kent church, with the intention to sell them on social media. Each human skull can sell for around £l,000, and if there is mummified skin or hair attached to it, it can fetch more. A child’s skull will fetch over £4,000. The majority of specimens in private hands, however, are the result of trade from impoverished societies. They may be trophies from antiquarians of the past or, more likely, originate from the medical supply trade of the last 150 years. At its peak, India was exporting over 60,000 skeletons each year for the instruction of medical and dental students. It was a lucrative colonial trade route, from remote Indian villages to the distinguished medical schools of the West. India placed a ban on sales in 1985 but, prior to that, almost every doctor and dentist trained in the UK had access to a real human skeleton that they had purchased.

Hundreds of thousands of human remains are in circulation, sourced mainly from India without consent. The means of acquiring these remains was unethical by today’s standards and, I would argue, by any standard. They were acquired by our medical schools and they have, in turn, been handed down to family members and frequently, of course, brought out to decorate at Halloween. Over time, though, people have started to become uncomfortable about the box of teaching bones in the attic, the skeleton hanging in the school biology laboratory or the articulated foot in the doctor’s surgery, and they wish to divest the responsibility for housing the remains of these unnamed deceased. Even the anatomical departments now shy away from the use of real human remains, replacing them with plastic teaching skeletons.

What should we do with all those real bones? Museums will not accept them without a licence and neither will anatomy departments. So the artists, the collectors and the macabre curiosity sellers will buy them and sell them—thousands of them. The Human Tissue Act 2004 provides no assistance for the management of these remains, even though they were purchased for the purpose of instruction in human anatomy—indeed, traders often quote the Human Tissue Act to legitimise their sale. The critical issue, as we have heard, is surely about dignity, decency and respect for the remains of those who have gone before us, and our responsibility, as the living, to speak for the dead and protect them from exploitation. How can we tolerate desecration or mutilation of human remains with impunity, when, as a society, we will send somebody to prison for 10 years for desecrating a statue?

We have a precedent in law that bans the sale of ivory but, ironically, we have no legislation that bans the sale of human remains, except for transplantation. Surely the overarching responsibility is to ensure respect for the deceased, and it should not be measured by how long they have been dead or whether we can attribute a name to their bones. I therefore hope that the Minister will take heed and help us take a global lead in instigating an outright ban on the sale and purchase of any part of a dead body. Surely it is unconscionable to do anything less. It should be a very simple process that would affect only the traders, because museums and anatomy departments do not sell human remains.

I think we should set up a task force of experienced personnel who can advise the Government and help find the best way forward. We could create an amnesty for the material that currently exists in our private collections, but I think that we must, surely, create a robust legal framework that bans the sale of the dead and addresses what is currently held in these private collections. It is no accident that when we choose to bury those we love, we trust that they will “rest in peace”. That should apply to all. We already have precedent and some guidance to work with; we just need to become international leaders, with a strong moral compass, through a simple mechanism that protects and prioritises the dignity and decency of, and respect for, the dead.