Four Corners: Mar 3

Monday’s Four Corners screens an HBO film on the shadowy world of international black market organ trafficking.

Every year thousands of human kidneys, lungs and hearts are transplanted. Some come from donors who seek no reward. Others come with a price.

In almost every country across the globe it’s illegal to buy or sell body organs, and yet despite this the black market for life-saving body parts is booming and authorities seem powerless to stop it.

This week Four Corners investigates the shadowy world of international black market organ trafficking. We meet the patients who are dying, the street level brokers, the doctors who perform the surgery and the policeman who is hot on their trail.

With unprecedented access to all the players, the documentary explores the legal, moral and ethical issues involved in this life and death drama. What would you do if you were faced with death? Would you buy a kidney or heart?

It’s not a black and white story. This is a world where villains often save lives and the medical establishment, helpless to do anything, often watches people die. This is a world, too, where the so-called victims or donors walk away content and the recipients return to their home with a new lease of life.

The drama unfolds in the Philippines’ slums and villages where whole generations of men have sold a kidney on the black-market. It moves to parts of Europe where donors, transplant patients, doctors and police play a cat and mouse game involving millions of dollars and the threat of long jail sentences.

From Istanbul to Manila, from Colorado to Kosovo, this story shows how the gift of life comes with a price. And that as long as the act of selling an organ is illegal, a black market of unregulated doctors will thrive, putting people at great risk.

Monday 3rd March at 8.30pm on ABC1.