The Italian Senate on March 4, 2015 passed a bill which provides that any person who trades, sells or manages illegally trafficked organs from living persons would serve a prison term of 3 to 12 years and pay a hefty fine from 50,000 to 300,000 euros. The bill sets out a punishment for whoever publicly encourages or advertises the selling of organs or transplant tourism. Doctors who promote or assist patients to travel to obtain an organ illegally would face lifetime disqualification for violating medical ethics.
The bill was driven by evidence of organ transplant abuse in China. Senator Maurizio Romani is quoted as saying, in answer to the question, “where do China’s 10,000 transplanted organs a year come from?”: “The answer is dramatic … Especially practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong are killed for their organs. I use the term cannibalism for this matter … We in Italy can’t stop these violations … But, we have the duty to make every effort in order not to be accomplices to this.”
Senator Ivana Simeoni said: “There are documents which dispel any doubt [about the sourcing of organs from practitioners of Falun Gong]… Only to think about this commoditization of the human body makes me shiver,”