Foreign experience of legal regulation of criminal liability for violation of the procedure for transplantation of human anatomical materials established by law
Authors:   Dnipropetrovs'k State University of Internal Affairs, Dnipro, Ukraine, Tkach Yu. 
Published: May 2024

The article examines the experience of individual countries in matters of legal regulation of criminal liability for violation of the procedure for transplantation of human anatomical materials in order to determine important legal assets of foreign legislation, which could be discussed for the purpose of further implementation in Ukrainian legislation. Within the framework of the article, we will analyze national and international legislation, namely, we will compare the content of Articles 143 and 144 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine with the content of the corresponding articles and provisions in the legislation of several countries from the perspective of the used terminology, interpretation of concepts, descriptions of crimes, measures of criminal liability, etc. The Constitution of Ukraine guarantees every person the right to life. However, experts increasingly raise questions about various violations of this right from the perspective of transplantation of human anatomical materials. Today, criminal offenses in relation to both donors and recipients become difficult to detect due to high self-interest and profitability, disguised nature, network systematicity, extensive illegal infrastructure and fast mechanisms for its recovery, group organization and strong connections with other criminal groups, use of deception, coercion, intimidation and other methods of forced donation, corruption in the field of donation, large-scale latent level of crimes related to transplantation. Detection of illegal transplantation is also burdened by their contradictory geography, when potential donors are recruited in the so-called "depressed" countries around the world, and anatomical materials are seized in countries that are highly developed in the field of transplantology, having loyal legislation to carry out such operations. In Ukraine, the detection of such crimes is also aggravated by the fact that people who are ready to illegally donate their organs for payment, travel to remove the organ outside the country and carry out their plans in other countries ("transplant tourism"). Due to the low level of information and enlightenment of the society in matters of transplantation, the detection of crimes in this area is also complicated by the so-called "victimhood" of people (both donors and recipients) – a set of personal traits that cause a high probability of becoming the object of a criminal attack (a tendency to become a victim of crime). These grounds contribute to a dynamic increase in the number of violations of the law-enforced procedure for the transplantation of human anatomical materials, which constitutes a high public danger. At the same time, the legal regulation of criminal liability for such violations still has certain differences. Therefore, the study of foreign experience in matters of transplantation, the comparison of the norms of articles in the Criminal Codes of different countries, and the analysis of concepts used in normative legal documents and their interpretations help to identify gaps in Ukrainian legislation, clarify the wording, expand the range of crimes and facilitate the qualification of their composition, adaptation of the Ukrainian legal system according to European standards.