United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2012

Topic 1

Black Market Trade in Human Organs

Organ transplantation is a global medical practice. Around 100,800 organs are transplanted every year (EGM Vienna Organ Trafficking.). Sadly, the demand of organs is not totally met by the available supply. Through the last decades, end-stage renal diseases, as well as some others organ diseases, have increased, leading to high demand in organs. However, due to ethical reasons, the organ donors are not enough to supply the demand. The fact that the demand is not met has increased radically the prices of organs. Also, due to the fact that the legal market of organs has a lot of restrictions, the black market of organs has become increasingly profitable. Since the legal market has a lot of restriction on organ donors, it has becoming quite profitable to illicitly traffic organs. Often, children and adults are kidnapped to harvest their organs. Sometimes, families will sell their members for financial means.

The black market has a lot of repercussions for global society. First, it can make legal acquisition more difficult for individuals that require a specific organ. This is because the black market of organs steals from the legal market. Also, the black market of organs is often controlled by criminal organizations. These organizations are growing stronger in great part because of the profits generated by their illicit black market of organs. It is therefore important to address this issue, not only because it is a way of saving the lives of illicit donors, who may have been victims of trafficking, but also because it is a way to strike the criminal organizations that feed themselves from the black market of organs.

Topic 2

Combating Urban Gangs

Over the last decades, populations in urban areas around the world have continued to increase. Industrialization has been the cause of migration from rural areas to urban where people seek to improve their quality of life. However, the concentration of people over the urban area has had negative consequences. These areas have over populated, and consequently the unemployment rates have grown. The overpopulation and unemployment have generated financial hunger in these urban areas. Sadly, rising unemployment has been tied to increased criminal behavior as financial desperation leads people to desperate and violent acts. This decade, the rates of crimes in the urban areas have had a remarkable growth, and security is at stake. In many urban areas, organized crime in the form of gang violence is a major contributor to the insecurity. Gang operations are not an isolated problem; gangs become involved in a wide variety of criminal behaviors from vandalism to drug trafficking, to corruption of the youth. “Property crime tends to be higher in cities in developed countries, while violent crime is higher in cities in the developing world.” (CCPCJ).

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