BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS / Šturma, Mozetic (eds)

It is not surprising that donation centres offer nothing less than this maximum amount of compensation while they do not require any precise statement (and much less any documentation) regarding real expenses incurred. One of the biggest donation centres furthermore offers a creative scheme of compensations which forms the following “price-list”: 1 st donation 200 CZK (as a deposit) 2 nd donation 800 CZK (1000 CZK if donated 14 days after the 1 st donation) 3 rd donation 500 CZK (600 CZK if donated 14 days after the 3 rd donation) The pattern then continues. If the 14 days interval between donations is kept, the donor is compensated with 600 CZK for each donation. Otherwise, there is a compensation of 500 CZK. There is no reason to assume that the real costs incurred would change by this pattern. It is clear that the so-called compensations for plasma donations are not compensatory in their nature, but rather represent de facto remuneration. 3.2 Human tissue handling by the National Cell and Tissue Centre More peculiar, but perhaps also more interesting, is the practice of human tissue handling by the National Cell and Tissue Centre. 16 The Centre is a joint-stock company, the shareholders of which are a private company (PrimeCell Therapeutics 17 ) and the Czech Republic. Its main activity consists of manufacturing advanced therapy medicinal products. However, the Centre also gathers human tissues (including bones and their parts, skin grafts, or corneas) from deceased donors from hospitals, grows the specimens, and then offers them to hospitals for the use in particular patients. The particular tissue specimens are offered in the official Tissue transplants catalogue. 18 While this system allows hospitals to have access to valuable tissue transplants, it gives rise to two main legal and ethical problems. The first problem consists in the pricing of human tissues. While the publicly available Tissue transplants catalogue does not include prices, there exists a price list with prices for which healthcare providers can buy each transplant. On this point, we should recall the Explanatory Report to the Convention which allows for a reasonable remuneration for technical acts performed on the basis of human tissues, such as sampling, testing, pasteurisation, fractionation, purification, storage, culture, or transport. 19 The key question, therefore, is whether the processing of transplants which takes place at the Centre is sufficient to represent such a technical act. The second problem lies in the lack of informed consent of the deceased donors or their families. There is an opt-out transplant donation system in the Czech Republic (Section 16 of the Act No. 285/2002 Coll., Transplantation act) ( Transplantation Act ) 16 Website available at: http://www.natic.cz/en/, accessed 9 December 2017. 17 Website available at: http://www.primecell.cz/, accessed 9 December 2017. 18 Available at: http://www.natic.cz/docs_files/PRI-013-2017-katalog-tkanovych-transplantatu_vnitrek_03_21. pdf, accessed 9 December 2017. 19 Explanatory Report to the Convention, Section 132.

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