Organ Tourism and Cadavers on Display Bill [HL]

Lord Ribeiro Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ribeiro (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for introducing this Bill. It is a pleasure to follow him. The Bill serves two purposes: first, to prevent a trade in organs, be it for transplantation or display in public exhibitions, and, secondly, to provide dignity and protection for prisoners in detention camps in China and elsewhere, where Uighurs and Falun Gong practitioners are exploited by the state.

The Human Tissue Act 2004, which was referred to earlier and which underpins this debate, followed the discovery of more than 2,000 pathological pots of body parts, removed between 1988 and 1995 from some 850 infants. This was the organ retention scandal at Alder Hey Hospital, which arose from a lack of consultation with the mothers affected by the disaster. Consent remains at the very heart of this Bill, and in the case of cadavers on display, evidence of consent is not always apparent, particularly if the body parts are the result of judicial execution by the Chinese state, as evidenced by Sir Geoffrey Nice in his report.

As president of the Royal College of Surgeons from 2005 to 2008, I continued a programme of repatriation of human remains held at the college’s Hunterian Museum, started by a former president, Sir Peter Morris, an Australian and a member of the working group on human remains commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in 2001. He concluded that meaningful research on the remains could be done in Australia with the collaboration and permission of the original peoples. Remains of Tasmanian Aboriginal origin were repatriated in 2002, setting a trend for other museums and universities in the UK. In 2007, during my presidency, a smoking ceremony was performed for the spirits of the ancestors by representatives of the indigenous peoples. The Royal College of Surgeons has repatriated remains to Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii, and will continue to do so if legal evidence is produced by claimants.

The Human Tissue Act 2004 made it clear that written consent was required while the person was alive before donated bodies or body parts could be displayed. That principle needs to be applied to the authorities in China to demonstrate that consent has been obtained before body parts are removed. In the debate on the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill on 12 January, my noble friend Lady Penn said that the Government would undertake to strengthen the Human Tissue Authority’s code of practice on public displays of imported tissue, and that consent standards would be clear, firm and enforceable. Six months on, can she say what progress has been made in this respect?