There are currently no UK laws prohibiting or limiting the buying and selling of human remains, other than organs and tissue for transplantation. A 10-Minute Rule Bill outlawing the buying and selling of human remains is to be introduced in the House of Commons by MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy on Wednesday 4th February.
Human remains are currently being bought and sold via a number of outlets, including ‘curiosity’ shops, antiques dealers, auction houses, and market stalls selling ‘curios’ and antiques. Individual ‘specialist’ traders flaunt the unethical origins of the remains they sell, and the lack of any legal control to stop them. Several of these traders use platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to maintain private customer bases, negotiate final prices, hide their activity in plain sight and to run auctions and raffles for prizes comprising the remains of deceased people.
The British Association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology (BABAO) began contacting traders with information on the unethical character of these sales in 2014. The Sale of Human Remains Taskforce was established in 2020 to better address the scope of the trade. Since then, the Taskforce has documented and challenged the sales of hundreds of sets of human remains, with many taking place in brick-and-mortar shops and auctions at antique salerooms, as well as on social media and elsewhere online.
Ms Ribeiro-Addy, the MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill, met with the Taskforce in October 2024 about the possibility of outlawing this practice. She said: “Next week, I will lay a Ten-Minute Rule Bill before Parliament, aiming to ban the sale of human remains. At the moment, we have stronger licensing rules around animal remains than we do around some human remains.
In recent years, we have continued to see auctions, e-commerce listings and social media posts advertising human body parts for sale. Many of these items have an uncertain provenance and may well have been obtained through illicit means. This grotesque trade often has a dark colonial history.
I hope MPs will vote to take legislation on this issue forward next week. Human beings are not items to be bought and sold.”
The types of human remains being sold vary widely. The majority bought and sold through mainstream auctions and shops are labelled as antique medical skeletons. These were imported to the UK in the tens of thousands throughout the 20th century. The trade in human skeletons from India was halted in 1985 following widespread grave-robbing and rumours of kidnap and murder. The trade in China was only banned in 2008, and it is widely believed that many of the bodies and body parts exported from China were those of unclaimed individuals, including executed prisoners.
Other remains include the ancestors from a range of global cultures and communities. Many of these are collected via illegal activities including recent looting or grave robbing, or were removed from communities without consent by those in positions of authority during the colonial period. Some ancestral remains which were ’traded’ with colonial officials or collectors are, today, once again recognised as ancestors who should not be commodified. In 2025, the National Museum of Vanuatu sent a statement to an auction house in the Netherlands demanding the immediate withdrawal of ancestral remains for sale citing a serious violation of cultural or spiritual responsibilities.
Some vendors ‘modify’ human remains into “decorative” objects and curios. Examples found by the BABAO Taskforce include a ‘windchime made from a human skull cap with ribs, a clavicle and human bone beads’, an ‘Orc skull’ (‘a real human skull stained dark with brass orc fangs’), a ‘human spine candlestick made from four real human vertebrae stacked on a turned wooden base’, a ‘human finger crucifix pendant’, a human skull fitted with brass nails for teeth and turned into a lamp, and human leather sold by the square inch.
The vast majority of human remains being sold in this way have very limited or no provenance to demonstrate how they were originally sourced or to provide evidence of their origin or age.
BABAO explains that the import and export of human remains into the UK from certain jurisdictions is illegal, however the buying and selling of human remains is highly unethical. BABAO welcomes the introduction of the bill by Ms Ribeiro-Addy. President Jelena Bekvalac welcomed the legislation, stating “after many years of sustained effort by the BABAO Taskforce, there is now hope that the sale of human remains can finally be made illegal, ensuring dignity and respect for all.”