BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS / Šturma, Mozetic (eds)

17 Selling and Owning Human Body Parts in the Light of Human Rights: the Ideal and the Current Practice in the Czech Republic *

Petr Šustek 1 Martin Šolc 2

Introduction It is not the trade in human body parts which usually comes to mind when speaking about business. However, the size of the black market for human body parts is distressing. 3 Furthermore, the universal consensus on the extra-commerciality of the human body is often violated in more subtle ways that are not always clearly illegal. Some of these activities also take place in the Czech Republic. In this paper, we will introduce the regulation of handling human body parts in the Convention on Biomedicine and in Czech civil law, and then examine the examples of the current practice in the Czech Republic. In the last two chapters, we will briefly analyse possible doctrinal and practical arguments in favour of and against the concept of self-ownership and the possible legalization of the market for human body parts. We politely ask the reader to consider this paper a very basic introduction to the topic, which could, however, highlight the most important aspects of the problem and provide an interested reader with inspiration for a deeper study. 1. Convention on Biomedicine The Council of Europe 4 Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine ( Convention ) is the most important international document concerning bio law in Europe with * This paper was written with the support of the Charles University UNCE project “Research Centre for Human Rights”. 1 JUDr., Ph.D., senior lecturer at the Department of Civil Law and coordinator of the Centre for Medical Law at the Faculty of Law, Charles University. 2 JUDr., Mgr., a Ph.D. student at the Department of Civil Law and the Centre for Medical Law at the Faculty of Law, Charles University. 3 It is roughly estimated that it generates the profit of 600 million to 1.2 billion USD per year on the global level. European Parliament. Trafficking in human organs, p. 24. 2015. http://www.europarl. europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2015/549055/EXPO_STU%282015%29549055_EN.pdf, accessed 12 December 2017. 4 Of course, it is not only the Council of Europe system of human rights protection which prohibits the commercialization of the human body. See for example the non-binding World Health Organization documents the Guiding Principles of Human Cell, Tissue and Organ Transplantation and the Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism.

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