a ruleBuying an organ, and being transplanted abroad

Two questions that are usually run together and should not be. First: may a person be paid for an organ? Almost everywhere, no, and the statutes say so in similar words. Second: may a person who lives somewhere else receive an organ here, from a local donor or a local deceased-donor pool? That is national allocation law, it varies, and it is the harder of the two to read.

The global frame is two documents, neither of them binding on anyone.

The World Health Assembly endorsed the WHO Guiding Principles on Human Cell, Tissue and Organ Transplantation in May 2010, in resolution WHA63.22. The professional frame is "The Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism", first agreed in 2008 and revised in 2018, whose custodian group maintains it. Between them they set the norm every national statute in this table reflects: no payment, and allocation on clinical grounds within a national system.

The national statutes then diverge on the second question, and mostly by an indirect route. Germany's is the clearest example of a rule that closes a door without mentioning a border: § 8(1) of the Transplantation Act confines living donation of a kidney or liver lobe to close relatives, spouses, partners, fiancés, and persons evidently close in a special personal attachment. Nothing in it says foreigner. It does not need to.

Britain's works through an authority instead. Section 33 of the Human Tissue Act 2004 makes a living-donor transplant an offence unless the Human Tissue Authority is satisfied that no reward has been given contrary to section 32 and that the regulations are met. Spain's works through gratuity and a judge: the living donor consents before a judge, and at least 24 hours must pass before the extraction.

Inference — those three instruments do the same work in three different registers — relationship, licence, and formality — and none of them is a nationality rule. A reader who asks whether a country bars foreign recipients will not find the answer by reading the payment prohibition, which is the part of the law that is easy to find.

The empirical literature is thin and single-centre. A 2022 paper reports graft and patient outcomes for kidney recipients who were transplanted abroad and followed up at one centre; a 2021 review covers liver transplantation and infection risk. Neither is a count of how many people travel, because no registry collects one.

Inference — twenty of the twenty-four rows below say no-data, and the pattern in which sites refused is itself informative: the statutes this project could read are those of states that publish their law in machine-readable form on a stable government portal, which is not the same set as the states this question is asked about.

What a row does not answer: whether a foreign recipient may be listed on a national deceased-donor waiting list and on what terms, whether a transplant performed abroad is followed up at home, and whether a home transplant unit will accept a returning patient onto its immunosuppression and surveillance programme. That last is the practical question, and it is clinical policy rather than law.

The Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation, run by the World Health Organization with Spain's national transplant organisation, publishes national activity figures. It counts procedures performed, not journeys made.

As of 17 September 2026 six rows rest on a named instrument that was read. Eighteen say no-data. The gap is a sourcing failure on this pass and not a statement about those countries' law.