From Prohibition to Protection: NOTA, India's Organ Trafficking Crisis, and the Imperative for a Harmonized International Legal Framework

The global shortage of transplantable organs has produced a shadow economy in which the bodies of the poor are converted into spare parts for the affluent. This paper examines that economy through India, a country whose transplantation law was, from its inception, modelled on the prohibitory logic of earlier statutes such as the United States' National Organ Transplant Act 1984 (NOTA), yet which has never escaped the trafficking networks that prohibition was meant to eliminate. Tracing the Transplantation of Human Organs Act 1994 through its 2011 amendment and 2014 Rules, the paper argues that India's domestic regime, though doctrinally sound, has been undermined by fragmented state-wise implementation, weak Authorisation Committee enforcement, and the absence of any binding link to the international anti-trafficking architecture developing alongside it. Drawing on documented rackets such as the Gurgaon "kidney king" scandal and the Amritsar transplant network, alongside the Supreme Court's recent intervention in Indian Society of Organ Transplantation v Union of India (2025), the paper shows that domestic prohibition alone cannot address a crime that is transnational by design. It surveys the instruments relevant to organ trafficking — the Palermo Protocol, the WHO Guiding Principles, the Declaration of Istanbul, and the Santiago de Compostela Convention — to show that these remain disconnected, unevenly ratified, and largely unenforceable against India's transplant-tourism corridors. The paper concludes that the movement its title describes, from prohibition to protection, requires India to ratify the Santiago de Compostela Convention, harmonise its penal provisions with Palermo-style trafficking definitions, and champion a binding global instrument treating organ sellers as victims rather than criminals.