ABSTRACT
Hungarian criminal law enlists violation of the human body and misuse of body parts among special crimes: neither among crimes against property nor among the crimes against human beings. While property law provides direct protection to the person's body and body parts, privacy and personality rights focus on the person and protect the person's body only indirectly. Property rights are used in relation to the body only when the tissues and cells are used to prepare another product, for example, blood, products, medicine or patentable cell lines. While Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) was originally developed to prevent transmission of serious diseases, it has recently been used to pick embryos based on certain desired characteristics, such as sex or suitability for use as a tissue donor. The legal claim for non-commercialisation and intellectual property law seems often in contradiction. Intellectual property law allows the establishment of patents on living organisms including even parts of the human body.
