Russian mother challenges law that saw daughter's organs taken

Yelena Sablina was stunned when she came across the forensic record of her late 19-year-old daughter, who died days after a speeding car hit her at a Moscow pedestrian crossing.
Going through the file she discovered that her daughter Alina's heart, kidneys and a number of other organs had been removed -- without her family's knowledge or consent.
Since making the grim discovery in February 2014, one month after Alina's death, Sablina has made it her mission to challenge a Russian law that allows doctors to remove the organs of dead people without needing permission.
"From day one doctors were looking at her as an organ donor," Sablina said of her only child, who spent six days in a coma before she died.

Sablina claims that on the last day of Alina's life, flustered doctors barred her from entering her daughter's room without explanation.
"It became clear to me that something had happened," Sablina told AFP in a telephone interview from her home in the central city of Yekaterinburg. "The next day, we received a call from an undertaker who said that Alina had died."

Sablina said that doctors' actions that day had made her concerned that they may have "helped" Alina die and harvested her organs.
The Moscow hospital that treated Alina, which told Russian media in 2014 that it had acted lawfully, could not be reached for further comment.

Sablina's case reached all the way to Russia's Constitutional Court and in February, her complaint about the legislation on the removal of organs without consent, in place since 1992, was rejected.
Presumed consent laws -- also known as "opt-out" laws -- are found in a number of European countries, including France, Spain and Austria.
Under this system a person, or his or her family, must express the desire not to have organs removed at death. If not the doctors assume consent.
In other countries, including the United States, people must explicitly express consent to have their organs harvested upon death.

Experts say that presumed consent, which tends to increase the number of organs harvested, does not in itself foster human rights violations and can help save lives.
Harvard law professor Glenn Cohen told AFP that concerns over such laws usually focus on "the cost and infrastructure as well as pragmatic political considerations".