Daily Times

At least two lawsuits filed at a top European court claim Russia violated Europe’s Human Rights Convention by removing organs from the recently dead without telling relatives.

Russia’s response: Asking relatives’ permission would be “inhumane.”

Documents provided to The Associated Press detail how Russia is fighting charges over the way it harvests organs in two cases submitted to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, last year. Separate decisions are expected in the coming months.

It is simply “inhumane” to ask family members about organ removal “almost simultaneously with notification of the death of their loved one,” Russia claimed in a July memo to the court. And there is not enough time to get consent before taking organs, government lawyers added.

As part of Russia’s “presumed consent” system, doctors routinely — and legally — remove organs from people who have died without either their approval or that of their loved ones. Russia argues in legal briefs that if doctors were required to get permission before taking organs, people would refuse and the transplantation system would collapse.

But that failure to inform grieving families, some of whom later discover their relatives’ organs were secretly taken, has led to at least two lawsuits that contend the Russian law and how it is interpreted violates fundamental human rights guaranteed in Europe.

Legal experts say the Russian approach to taking organs can be dangerous because it undermines trust. But some ethicists said Russia’s approach should be commended — and even copied — to help the living.

Many countries have presumed consent systems, including Austria, Spain and Sweden, and others across Europe are moving toward a similar approach, including England and the Netherlands. But many physicians say none is as aggressive as Russia. For example, many countries include provisions specifying that doctors cannot take organs if there are no next of kin or if the next of kin have serious misgivings.

Transplant doctors say that even though they could legally remove organs from dead people without permission, it’s considered unethical to do so and isn’t common practice.

“We respect the situation and the fact that people are suffering,” said Dr. Stefan Schneeberger, a deputy director of transplant surgery at Innsbruck University in Austria. “I don’t think it’s reasonable to just force organ donation.”

When Galina Valyuschenko’s son, Igor Verevkin, 49, suffered injuries to his head, lungs, ribs and elsewhere during a bar fight in Omsk, southwestern Siberia, in September 2010, she asked doctors not to disconnect him from life-support machines and not to remove his organs. He died within two days of being hospitalized.

It was only when Valyushchenko read an autopsy report two months later that she realized the hospital’s chief physician had taken her son’s kidneys.

“They never asked for permission to take out my son’s organs, but I did not put (this) into writing because I did not know they could do this,” Valyushchenko told the AP.

Russia said it was legally unnecessary for doctors to advise Valyushchenko of their plans.

In a document sent to the European court, Russia said that it should make families feel better, not worse, if they learn their relatives’ organs were taken.

“The Russian government would like to refer to a quite common phenomenon when the family of a deceased person feels emotionally comforted by the fact that the deceased person’s organs were recovered for transplantation and used to save other people’s lives,” the document reads. That reasoning was little consolation to Valyushchenko, who brought a case to the Omsk regional court in 2013 against the doctors for improperly taking her son’s organs.

Published in Daily Times, March 22^th 2018.