Treating War Detainees and Terror Suspects: Legal and Ethical Responsibilities of Military Physicians

Abstract

Several international legal instruments and ethical guidelines bestow rights and impose duties on detainees and military physicians, respectively. Ideological totalism, moral disengagement, and victim blame can facilitate the abuse of detainees, and this mindset must be avoided by military physicians. Physicians should report suspected violations of detainee rights to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture or organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, or Human Rights Watch. To discourage victimization of physician whistleblowers on detainee abuse, domestic medical associations should pressure their respective governments to explicitly endorse their codes of ethics. Domestic medical communities should regard it as their ethical duty to pressure their respective governments to accede to the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, if their governments have not already done so. They should also regard it as their ethical duty to pressure their governments to afford "prisoner of war" status to persons they detain. If faced with a conflict between following national policies and following universally accepted, multilateral principles of international law and ethics, military physicians should consider themselves ethically bound to follow the latter. The duty of care must supercede any blanket notion of loyalty, obligation, allegiance, or patriotism that the physician may feel is owed to his or her station. This is the true ethos of service to humankind.