Medical Associations and Accountability for Physician Participation in Torture

Abstract

Doctors are integral to the practice of modern torture. Some devise torture techniques (like rectal water infusions) in order to minimize incriminating scars. Some monitor and treat prisoners undergoing torture in order to prevent them from unintentionally dying. Some falsify medical records and death certificates to assist regimes in concealing injuries or deaths from torture. Many claim to act under duress, but the example set by the majority of their national colleagues who either fight against torture or refuse to collaborate with the practice belies such claims. Torture doctors work for fascist dictatorships such as China, Uzbekistan, and North Korea. They also work for democracies such as the United States, Portugal, and Spain. Some see and ignore torture victims who are brought by police or soldiers to public clinics or hospitals. Others hold military rank or contracts with police and see tortured persons in government prisons. After World War II, only a few of the several hundred Nazi torture doctors and none of the Japanese torture doctors were punished. In 1947, the new World Medical Association (WMA) endorsed a British Medical Association working paper that asserted that doctors who participated in torture were personally responsible and should be individually punished to deter such acts. The WMA called on the German medical associations to expel such doctors, thereby revoking their medical licenses, and endorsed criminal judicial punishment of such crimes. But doctors' torturing with impunity remained the rule for decades. A fair amount is known about Soviet-era psychiatric abuse of dissidents; none of the doctors involved were punished. Germany ignored Stasi torture doctors. Great Britain gave a free pass to physician participation in torture during decolonialization and the more recent troubles in Northern Ireland. Although, in 1992, the British Medical Association recommended that alleged torture doctors be fully and fairly investigated and that those found culpable [be] barred from medical practice and from membership in professional associations, it explicitly said in 2009 that it would not investigate allegations against physicians]. The United States and its professional associations have allowed medicalized torture in war-on-terror prisons to pass without punishment or censure. There is sketchy knowledge of physician complicity with penal amputations and flogging across the Arab and Asian world, and the commonplace medical collaboration with torture in the world's prisons and police stations (for example, in India) is only dimly outlined. The Doctors Who Torture Accountability Project lists 89 countries where it is confirmed that doctors have collaborated with torture with complete impunity. (The site is unable to assess whether physicians have collaborated with torture in 49 additional countries, even though many of these countries are known to torture.) A huge amount of work is needed to discover the full extent of medical complicity with torture.... Language: en