Human trafficking: Trade of human organs will thrive unless culprits are punished: Dr Rizvi

SIUT's Dr Adeeb Rizvi speaks about the illegal trade, says it is against religion

KARACHI: The recent case of human trafficking for illegal organ transplant worries Dr Adeeb Rizvi, who fears this trade will thrive unless the culprits are punished.

"The government needs to charge those two men arrested from Jinnah International Airport," said the SIUT founding director at a press briefing organised by the Transplantation Society of Pakistan (TSP) in collaboration with Sindh Human Organ and Tissue Transplantation Authority (Hota) at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT) on Wednesday.

A couple of decades ago, Pakistan was the largest market for the trafficking of human organs in the world, Dr Rizvi pointed out. The selling and buying of human organs is against Islam and is also illegal, he added.



For their part, the monitoring committee of the transplantation society has requested the health secretary, Iqbal Hussain Durrani, to file a complaint against the two men, Rizwan Ahmed and Sarfaraz Bhatti, who were caught on their way to Mauritius via Dubai. They were planning to go to India through this route for an illegal kidney transplant.

An FIR number 273/2014 has been registered by the Federal Investigation Agency's (FIA) Anti-Human Trafficking Circle. According to the FIR, Ahmed was allegedly involved in organ trade for commercial purposes. Ahmed informed FIA that he lured Bhatti, who was unemployed and under debt, to give his kidney for a transplant to a patient in a New Delhi hospital. During the meeting, the committee decided that they only want to press charges against Ahmed as Bhatti was acting under duress.

Dr Rizvi explained that Hota is not empowered to take legal action and it can only record negligence.

Other participants shared his fears that careless handling of this case can lead to an increase in this trade. People should be made aware that this is illegal and they can be punished, said the chief of the evaluation committee of Sindh Hota, Justice (retd) Majida Rizvi.

The discussion also moved towards tackling poverty. A member of the Ophthalmic Society of Pakistan, Dr Akhtar Jamal, was of the view that poverty can never end. The problem of human organ trafficking could only be solved if people are educated.

Dr Rizvi said, however, that poverty can only come to an end when the central government distributes resources equally. Most cases of human organ trade are taking place in the Punjab, said TSP secretary general Dr Manzoor Hussain. Not a single case occurred in Sindh because we have SIUT in Sindh, he claimed, adding that people from all over the province come to the institute.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 11^th, 2014.