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Over
a hundred NGOs slam HIV-based arrests and trials ‘of’ gay men
08 Apr 2008- Egypt- Amnesty International As five
more men face trial in Cairo on 9 April in a widening and dangerous
police crackdown on people living with HIV/Aids, 117 organisations
worldwide working in the fields of health and human rights condemned the
crackdown and the participation of medical personnel.
In a letter to the Health Ministry and the Egyptian
Doctors’ Syndicate, the groups, led by Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch, said that doctors who helped interrogate men jailed on
suspicion of being HIV-positive violated their own medical ethics, and
their conduct led to a breach of trust in a privileged relationship.
Cairo police have jailed 12 men since October 2007 in a
widening hunt for people suspected of being HIV-positive. The arrests
began when one man, stopped on the street during an altercation, told
officers he was HIV positive.
Police arrested him and the man with him, beat and abused
them, and began picking up others whose names or contact information
they found through interrogating the first detainees.
All the men were charged with the “habitual practice of
debauchery,” a term which in Egyptian law includes consensual sexual
acts between men.
The Cairo-based Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights
found a document from the Ministry of Health and Population titled
“Questionnaire for Patients with HIV/AIDS” in one of the men’s case
files.
It includes “yes” or “no” questions that doctors from the
ministry apparently use to interrogate people in the crackdown about
whether they had sexual relations “with the other sex” or “with the same
sex,” or “with one person” or “with more than one person.”
Prosecutors included the men’s answers that they had
relations “with the same sex” as evidence of their guilt.
Doctors from the Ministry of Health also forced all the
detainees to have HIV tests without their consent.
Meanwhile, doctors from Egypt’s Forensic Medical
Authority enforced abusive anal examinations on the men to “prove” they
had had sex with other men.
Several of the men have told lawyers that police and
guards beat them in detention. A prosecutor informed one of them that he
had tested positive for HIV by saying: “People like you should be burnt
alive. You do not deserve to live.”
The prisoners who tested HIV-positive were held in
hospitals, chained to their beds, for months. After a domestic and
international outcry, the Ministry of Health finally ordered the men
unchained on 25 February.
“It is unacceptable for doctors to perform forcible HIV
tests, or to examine people to ‘prove’ offences that should never be
criminalised, says Malcolm Smart, director of the Middle East and North
Africa programme of Amnesty International.
“Doctors who engage in or enable human rights abuses are
violating their most elemental responsibilities.”
Joe Amon, director of the HIV/AIDS program at Human
Rights Watch, added that doctors must put patients first, not join a
witch-hunt driven by prejudice.
“Now more than 100 human rights groups are reminding
Egyptian doctors of the oath they took to respect patients’ privacy,
autonomy, and consent. This is one of the oldest traditions of medical
responsibility, as well as an obligation under human rights law,” Mr.
Amon said.
On January 13, 2008, a Cairo court convicted four of the
men of “debauchery” charges and sentenced them to a year in prison. On
February 2, their sentences were upheld on appeal.
Then, on March 4, 2008, Cairo prosecutors handed down
indictments against five more men, who will face charges of “habitual
practice of debauchery” at their 9 April trial.
One of them faces an additional charge of facilitating
the practice of debauchery for the other men. The charges were dropped
for three other men.
Before issuing the latest indictment, the lead prosecutor
told a lawyer for the defendants that the men should not be allowed to
“roam the streets freely” because the government considered them “a
danger to public health.”
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