Organ trafficking “is a crime against humanity,” said Monsignor Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, in the framework of a colloquium organized on the subject in the Vatican on February 7-8, 2017.
On the occasion of this event, for the first time the Academy invited a representative of China, accused in the past of the illegal transplant of organs of individuals sentenced to death. The practice was officially prohibited on January 1, 2015. “We want to encourage the movement towards change,” explained the Chancellor to the media.
Speaking on Vatican Radio, Monsignor Sanchez Sorondo recalled that the Vatican institution has worked on this subject for several years: “The first thing that the Pope asked us, three years ago [after his election] was: ‘I want the Academy to study the problem of the traffic of human beings and organ trafficking.’”
“We began with forced labor, then prostitution <and> drugs,” he added. The objective of this new meeting is to study “the movement of money that turns around this phenomenon, what is the real extent of the trafficking.”
And Monsignor Sanchez Sorondo lamented : There is much silence about this! It is a practice that cannot happen without the complicity of doctors so we addressed the question of doctors’ conscience.”
“ To remove an organ of a person, in a conscious way, as is the case,” he stated, “is a crime against humanity!”
For the Chancellor, the “fundamental cause” of organ trafficking is the comfort of well-off societies: “those who are rich want to live well; therefore they do no matter what to have everything, including organs.”
