Organs, Police and Public Health: the WHO and INTERPOL Agreement of 16th October 2026 and the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 2010

On Friday, 16th October 2026, the World Health Organization and INTERPOL announced from Geneva and Lyon an agreement that joins INTERPOL’s police work to WHO’s public health work. It names three fields: exceptional health security events, including the suspected misuse of chemical or radioactive material and unusual biological events, and mass gatherings; the trafficking of persons for the removal of organs and the illegal trade in human organs, tissues and cells; and illicit trade affecting public health, from falsified medicines to illegally produced alcohol. The release gives no mechanism and no timetable. It does not need to, for the purposes of a Pakistani reader, since INTERPOL works through one door in every member country, and the question for Pakistan is who carries an organ case to that door.

The answer under the law as it stands is that almost nobody can, and the reason is a single subsection that has sat unnoticed in every version of the transplantation statute since 2010.

The door is in the Federal Investigation Agency

INTERPOL’s National Central Bureau for Pakistan is a bureau of the Federal Investigation Agency in Islamabad, headed by the Director General of the Agency under the Ministry of Interior. Notices, diffusions and requests for assistance go through it. A provincial police force or a provincial regulator that wants a foreign broker traced, a foreign recipient identified or a foreign hospital asked for its records must first bring the case within the Agency’s reach.

For human trafficking that route exists. Section 8(2) of the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act, 2018 (Act XXXIV of 2018) gives the investigation to the Federal Investigation Agency where the offence “involves transportation of the victim into or out of Pakistan”, and Section 10, as substituted in 2025, sends that trial to the Special Court (Central). Section 9 makes the offence cognizable, non-compoundable and non-bailable. That is a statute built to be worked by police, across borders, with INTERPOL behind it.

The trafficking Act does not mention organs

Section 3(1) of the 2018 Act defines trafficking in persons as recruiting, harbouring, transporting, providing or obtaining a person “for compelled labour or organized beggary or sexual exploitation” through force, fraud or coercion. Those are the only three purposes. The removal of organs is not among them.

The omission is not an accident of drafting in 2018 that nobody has had the chance to correct. Pakistan acceded on 4th November 2022 to the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, whose Article 3(a) lists “the removal of organs” in the minimum content of exploitation that a State Party’s offence must cover. Parliament then returned to Section 3 in the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons (Amendment) Act, 2025 (Act IX of 2025), assented on 14th March 2025, and added organised beggary and sexual exploitation, raised the penalty to ten years and a fine of one million rupees, and made the victim’s consent irrelevant. It did not add organ removal. Hence a man recruited in Punjab by fraud, driven across a provincial border and relieved of a kidney is not, on the text of the Act, a victim of trafficking in persons at all, unless the prosecution can bring the facts under compelled labour, which it cannot.

The transplantation Act is a complaint case

What is left is the transplantation statute. The Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 2010 (Act VI of 2010) was enacted on 18th March 2010 after the Honourable Supreme Court of Pakistan, hearing the human organs trade matter in 2007, directed the Federal Government to legislate. After the Eighteenth Amendment the subject devolved, and the Act now lives in provincial form: Punjab adopted it with amendments by the Punjab Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues (Amendment) Act, 2012 (Act LVII of 2012), in force from 1st November 2012; Balochistan by the Balochistan Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues (Amendment) Act, 2012 (Balochistan Act VII of 2012) of 3rd October 2012; and Sindh re-enacted it as the Sindh Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 2013 (Sindh Act X of 2013) of 1st March 2013. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa went further and replaced it: the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Medical Transplantation Regulatory Authority Act, 2014 (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Act No. XI of 2014), assented on 27th March 2014 and published on 2nd April 2014, repeals the 2010 Act in the Province by Section 35, and its offences of removal without authority and commercial dealing sit in Sections 20 and 21, with the same ten years and one million rupees. The only federal amendment since, the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues (Amendment) Act, 2023 (Act XXIX of 2023), assented on 20th June 2023, inserted Section 4A on consent to deceased donation on the driving licence and touched nothing else.

The offences are serious on paper. Section 10 punishes the removal of an organ without authority, and Section 11 every form of commercial dealing, from paying for an organ to advertising for one, each with imprisonment up to ten years and a fine up to one million rupees. Section 7(1) forbids donation by a Pakistani citizen to a citizen of another country, which is the provision aimed squarely at transplant tourism.

Then comes Section 14(2), in identical words in the Punjab, Balochistan and Sindh texts:

“No Court shall take cognizance of an offence under this Act except on a complaint in writing made by, (a) the Monitoring Authority or its Secretary; or (b) an aggrieved person who has given notice of not less than fifteen days, in such manner as may be prescribed, to the Monitoring Authority, of the alleged offence and of his intention to lodge a complaint.”

The consequence is plain. An offence under the Act reaches a court only as a private complaint, laid by the “Monitoring Authority” or by the victim after fifteen days’ notice to the “Monitoring Authority”. The police are not named. The “Monitoring Authority” is defined by Section 2(f) as a body constituted “to monitor the process of transplantation”, and in Punjab it is a committee chaired by the Minister for Health and made up mostly of the presidents of medical societies, with the Home Secretary’s representative as its only link to law enforcement. It is a regulator of hospitals. Section 8(2)(b) does empower it to “investigate and hold inquiry” into breaches, but an inquiry by a medical regulator is not a criminal investigation, and nothing in the Act connects it to the Federal Investigation Agency, to the “National Central Bureau” or to any foreign authority.

The victim, the second route, is the person least able to use it: the Act’s own background, recorded in the study of kidney vendors by the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation, is that the sellers were overwhelmingly poor and in debt bondage. A bonded labourer who has lost a kidney is not going to serve fifteen days’ written notice on a provincial authority and then instruct counsel to lay a complaint before a Magistrate.

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa he would have to wait ninety. Section 25(2) of the Act of 2014 keeps the same bar in a harsher form: no court shall take cognizance of an offence under that Act except on a complaint in writing by the “Transplant Monitoring Committee” or its Secretary, or by an aggrieved person who has given “notice of not less than ninety days” to the “Transplant Monitoring Committee”. Under Section 14(2) the “Transplant Monitoring Committee” is chaired by an Additional Secretary of the Health Department, with the Director Health, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as its Secretary. Hence in that Province the victim waits three months rather than fifteen days, and the only official complainant is the Health Department itself.

What the 2023 case showed

On 1st October 2023 the caretaker Chief Minister of Punjab, Mohsin Naqvi, announced the arrest of an eight member gang said to have carried out 328 unauthorised kidney transplants, the operations performed in private premises in Lahore, in Taxila and in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, with a motor mechanic acting as anaesthetist. He put the charge at between Rs. 2.8 million for a domestic recipient and Rs. 10 million for a foreign one, and said the case might be sent to the Federal Investigation Agency if needed. The BBC reported that the alleged leader, Dr Fawad Mumtaz Khan (named in the press of October 2023 as Fawad Mukhtar, and in the court reports of 2025 and 2026 as Fawad Mumtaz Khan), had been arrested five times before for malpractice and had secured bail each time, and the police reported at least three deaths.

Every element of the problem is in that one case. The recipients included foreigners, which is a Section 7(1) breach and an international matter. The operations crossed from Punjab into Azad Jammu and Kashmir, where neither the Punjab Act nor any other Pakistani provincial Act runs. The alleged surgeon had been arrested five times and was still operating, which is what a complaint-based offence with a one million rupee ceiling produces. And the route to the Federal Investigation Agency was something the Chief Minister could offer at a press conference, not something the statute supplied.

The sequel shows what the statute does supply. On an FIR registered at Taxila under Sections 9, 10 and 11 of the Act and the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act, 2018, after the surgeon’s arrest on 27th March 2023 during a transplant in progress, a Magistrate at Taxila convicted him on 17th December 2024 and sentenced him to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine of one million rupees, and the Additional Sessions Judge upheld the sentence. The Lahore High Court, Rawalpindi Bench, by an order reported on 16th July 2025, upheld the conviction under Section 10, set aside the conviction under Section 334 of the Pakistan Penal Code for want of evidence, reduced the sentence to the period already undergone under Section 382-B of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898 and the fine to Rs. 100,000, and set him free. The Punjab Government’s appeal came before a three-member bench of the Honourable Supreme Court of Pakistan on 3rd June 2026, where the Additional Prosecutor General said nine FIRs stood against the accused across Punjab, and where Mr Justice Muhammad Hashim Khan Kakar observed that “the control of the relevant authority in Punjab is negligible” and that a kidney could be had from Punjab for between Rs. 1.8 million and Rs. 2 million. Hence a raid during surgery, a conviction and two appellate affirmations produced, for a surgeon said to have charged up to Rs. 10 million a kidney, two years and three months in custody and a fine of one tenth of the statutory ceiling; and the one charge that might have carried the case to the Federal Investigation Agency, the trafficking Act, was laid under a statute that does not mention organs at all.

What the agreement now asks of Pakistan

The agreement of 16th October 2026 will not change the law of any member state. What it will do is put WHO’s technical work on organ governance alongside INTERPOL’s notices and databases, and that is useful only to a country whose own law can feed a case into both. Pakistan’s can feed neither in an organ case, since its trafficking statute omits organs and its transplantation statute keeps the police out of the courtroom. Hence three amendments are urgently required, none of them long.

First, Parliament should add “removal of organs” to the purposes in Section 3(1) of the Prevention of Trafficking in Persons Act, 2018, as the Protocol to which Pakistan acceded in 2022 already requires. That single change brings a cross-border organ case within Section 8(2), and therefore within the Federal Investigation Agency and its “National Central Bureau”, without touching any provincial subject.

Second, each Provincial Assembly should rewrite Section 14 of its transplantation Act, and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Section 25 of the Act of 2014, so that an offence under Sections 10 and 11, or Sections 20 and 21 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, is cognizable on information to the police in the ordinary way, while keeping the power of the “Monitoring Authority” to complain of regulatory breaches. The finding of the Evidence for Health review of federal health law in 2024, that the question of cognizance under this Act needs serious reconsideration, was right, and the 2023 case is the evidence for it.

Third, the fine should be revisited. A ceiling of one million rupees, fixed in 2010, is a tenth of what the gang was said to charge a single foreign recipient in 2023.

Until then, the WHO and INTERPOL agreement will have a Pakistani door with no corridor leading to it.