Black markets

The predictable result of banning legal trade in organs. Instead of having legitimate markets with organs of verifiable provenance, we have this:

Citing evidence from witnesses, the draft report says the KLA network maintained bases to keep scores of captives, select them for the suitability of organ harvesting and later killed some of them to extract organs from mid-1999 to mid-2000.

"In the months directly after the declared end of the Kosovo conflict in June 1999, members and affiliates of the KLA purportedly delivered scores of persons they had abducted into secret detention on Albanian territory," Marty's report said.

Evidence suggested, Marty added, that the organisers used safe locations in Kukes on the Kosovo border, the Mat region further south, and at Fushe-Kruje near the international airport. The location in Fushe-Kruje was specially built.

"It constituted a state-of-the-art reception centre for the organised crime of organ trafficking. It was styled as a makeshift operating clinic, and it was the site at which some of the captives held by KLA members and affiliates had their kidneys removed against their will," Marty's report said.

Age, sex, state of health and ethnicity, with mostly Serbs targeted, determined the selection.

"Some of these captives are said to have pleaded with their captors to be spared the fate of being 'chopped into pieces'," Marty said, citing source testimonies his team had obtained.

"The testimonies on which we based our findings spoke credibly and consistently of a methodology by which all of the captives were killed, usually by a gunshot to the head, before being operated on to remove one or more of their organs."

Then they shipped them to overseas clinics, part of an international black market in organ-trafficking for transplants.

And I'll guess that a majority of folks reading the story would see it as a reason not to allow trade in organs rather than one of the reasons we really ought to consider it.