Organ traffickers are targeting refugees in Egypt, warns charity

The ongoing political turmoil in Egypt has allowed organ traffickers to continue to prey on Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers, concludes a new report by the US based charity the Coalition for Organ Failure Solutions.

Abuses include removing kidneys "by inducing consent, coercion, or outright theft." In some cases sex trafficking was associated with incidents of organ removal. "Many of the victims came to Egypt seeking refuge from the genocide and armed conflict in their homeland," says the report.

The coalition identified 57 Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers in Egypt who said they were victims of organ trafficking. Each case involved the removal of a kidney. It conducted in-depth interviews with 12 of these people.

The coalition's Egyptian branch arranged ultrasound and physical examination of five of the people as part of its follow-up care outreach services. These examinations confirmed that kidneys had been removed in all five cases.

Three of the interviewees said that people smugglers helped them to enter Egypt and worked directly with the organ traffickers who arranged their kidney removal. Interviewees' statements indicated that some women and girls are simultaneously being trafficked for sex and organs (nine of the 57).

The report says that 500 to 1000 licensed and 100 to 200 unlicensed transplantations are performed each year in Egypt.

The coalition's director, Debra Budiani-Saberi, told the BMJ that despite the establishment of a new law in Egypt in 2010 prohibiting the practice, the recent unrest has meant that "organ trafficking has continued to thrive and, in some cases, has involved more abusive methods of obtaining a kidney."

The group has not yet been able to follow up recent reports about the kidnapping and abuse of sub-Saharan African migrants smuggled into the Sinai peninsula on their way to Israel, which include claims of torture and removal of organs that have resulted in death.

Dr Budiani-Saberi said, "The increase of brutalities in the cases we have received in recent weeks in tandem with the allegations of abuses in the Sinai that include organ trafficking prompted us to release the report now."

Welcoming the report, Luc Noel, head of transplantation at the World Health Organization, told the BMJ that most countries had now prohibited the sale or purchase of cells, tissues, and organs in line with a 2010 World Health Assembly resolution (www.transplant-observatory.org/Documents/WHOlegethgp.pdf), which meant that the black market in organs had fallen to less than 10% of transplantations worldwide.

Dr Noel emphasised that health professionals had a key role in "combating transplant tourism, organ trafficking, and commercialism."

Although few of the cases identified so far constituted outright theft, the report says that the processes involved include some degree of coercion and thus "should be considered cases of human trafficking for organ removal."

Although most of the victims of organ trafficking in Egypt are of Egyptian nationality, the coalition estimates that there are likely to be hundreds of Sudanese and numerous others from Jordan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria. The total number of victims of organ trafficking in Egypt is estimated to be in the thousands.