I’ll try and get back to some regular blogging with some nice photos or wallpapers tomorrow, but for today I just wanted to do my small part to generate some concern and action over the nurses that are being held in Libya, Lawyers call for science to clear AIDS nurses in Libya
International pressure needed to save health workers from death penalty.
Lawyers defending six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics’ innocence. The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them.
On 28 August, when the prosecution was scheduled to close its case, the Libyan prosecutor called for the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to be sentenced to death. Attorneys from Lawyers Without Borders, who are handling the defence of the six, have responded by calling for the international community to request that the court order an independent scientific assessment, by international AIDS experts, of how the children became infected.
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One reason for the lack of interest, he says, is the widespread notion that the trial is a sideshow, and that the “real decisions” will be made by diplomats (see page 245). Altit argues that diplomacy has so far failed to secure results, and that the medics’ release will only be secured by using scientific evidence to fight the case in the Tripoli courtroom. He hopes that exposing the “emptiness” of the prosecution case will ramp up enough international pressure to force governments to take action.
At present, the case has been sidelined by broader geopolitical interests in the opening of oil-rich Libya to international relations, says Antoine Alexiev, another defence lawyer on the case. The United States decided in May to re-establish diplomatic relations with Libya. And Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, has been given red-carpet treatment at the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels — without mention of the medics’ situation.
snip
According to Alexiev, the decision to throw out the report removed all scientific content from the case, leaving a series of prejudgements, and confessions extracted under torture. “It’s scandalous,” he says. “This is a complex scientific affair, and it is impossible to judge it without a scientific basis.”
It’s scandalous. This is a complex affair, and it is impossible to judge it without a scientific basis.
Montagnier, whose efforts helped secure a retrial in the first place, says he too is upset by how events in Tripoli are progressing. “It’s a rerun of the first trial,” he says. “It’s embarassing politically for Gaddafi, but there is the pressure of the parents, who absolutely need to find a scapegoat. Of course this can’t be the Libyans, so it falls on the medics.”
The defence is scheduled to plead on 21 September, but Altit is not convinced that the science will be fairly heard. All attempts by the defence to present its arguments have been “systematically blocked”, he claims, for example by switching the schedule. “The trial should be fair and equitable; until now it has been anything but.”
Legally, the Montagnier/Colizzi report cannot be reinstated after having been thrown out, so the defence is pinning its hopes on persuading the court to appoint an independent science panel to produce a new report. The Tripoli court has resisted all such calls, says Alexiev. “We are hitting a wall, and that is unlikely to change before the end of this trial.”
The defence is therefore resigned to probably losing the current trial, he says, and is setting its sights on the six’s last chance: a final appeal in the Supreme Court, which could convene immediately after the Tripoli verdict, currently expected in November. “We need to convince the Supreme Court to nominate that international scientific assessment,” he says.
The science blog Pharyngula has more,
These six are international aid workers. Nurses and a doctor. They are our colleagues, our brothers and sisters in a global war on disease and suffering, now sacrificial lambs in a game of internal Libyan politics. Nature is leading the way on the print side. No one knows what the scientific blogosphere can do. Let’s find out.
I don’t know how to contact Lybia directly, but they do have an embassy in England,
Lybia Embassy
15 Knightsbridge
London SW1X 7LY
Consular Section: 61-62 Ennismore Gardens
London, SW7 1NH
Telephone: (020) 7201 8280
(020) 7589 6120 (Consular)
Fax: (020) 7245 0588
(020) 7589 6087
By all means watch the language and be professional. Faxing them an appeal would be great or if you want to stop at the post office an international postcard 6 inches long by 4-1/4 inches high costs 75 cents to send to England. If nothing else ask the Libyan government to hear the scientific evidence, to free the healthcare workers. According to reports two of the nurses have been raped and they have all suffered some torture.
update: 12-20-06, Libya again orders six to death in HIV case
A Libyan court again sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to be shot by a firing squad for deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV, more than 50 of whom have died. The decision complicates Libya’s efforts to improve relations with the West.
The defendants sat calmly as the verdict was read by presiding Judge Mahmoud Hawissa, according to reports from Tripoli, the Libyan capital. They have been imprisoned since 1999 and previously were sentenced to death by firing squad in 2004, but the Supreme Court overturned that ruling a year ago in the face of international protests and ordered a new trial.
The defendants all claimed innocence and said in testimony that earlier statements in which they confessed to deliberately infecting 426 children with the virus that causes AIDS were extracted by torture. Libyans have contended the defendants were carrying out an AIDS experiment that went wrong.
The verdict drew expressions of anger and alarm from Bulgaria and its supporters in the nearly eight-year-old case, which now appears likely to drag on for months, if not years, more.
“We are going to urge the Libyan political leadership to engage in the process,” said Bulgaria’s foreign minister, Ivaylo Kalfin, from Washington, where he had met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hours after the verdict was announced.
Lawyers say they’ll appeal
Kalfin said his country was working through the Libyan Foreign Ministry to ask the nation’s leader, Moammar Gadhafi, and political institutions to intervene on the ground that an inefficient and biased judicial system had failed to deal with the case credibly.
