NAZARETH, ISRAEL // Israel’s watchdog body on medical ethics has
failed to investigate evidence that doctors working in detention facilities are
turning a blind eye to cases of torture, Israeli human rights groups claim.
The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) has ignored repeated
requests to examine such evidence, the rights groups said, even though it has
been presented with examples of Israeli doctors who have broken their legal and
ethical duty towards Palestinians in their care.
The accusations will add fuel to a campaign backed by hundreds of
doctors from around the world to force Yoram Blachar, who heads the IMA, to step
down from his recent appointment as president of the World Medical Association
(WMA).
More than 700 doctors have signed a petition arguing that Dr
Blachar has disqualified himself from leadership of the WMA, the profession’s
governing ethical body, by effectively condoning torture in Israel.
The campaign against Dr Blachar has gained ground rapidly since
his appointment as president in November. Critics said his alleged complicity in
the use of torture in Israeli detention facilities can be traced to 1995, when
he became chairman of the IMA.
Until 1999, when Israel’s Supreme Court restricted torture,
Israeli doctors routinely supervised the medical treatment of abused detainees,
mostly Palestinians from the occupied territories.
During that period Dr Blachar surprised many colleagues by
expressing support for Israeli interrogators’ use of “moderate physical
pressure” in a letter to The Lancet, the British medical journal. The phrase
covers a wide range of practices from beatings and binding prisoners in painful
positions to sleep deprivation. It is regarded by human rights organisations as
a euphemism for torture.
Despite the 1999 court ruling, a coalition of 14 Israeli human
rights groups known as United Against Torture concluded in its latest annual
report in November that Israeli detention facilities are still using torture
systematically. Israeli doctors are also being relied on to treat the resulting
injuries.
Last week, Physicians for Human Rights and the Public Committee
against Torture in Israel published a joint report examining hundreds of arrests
in which Palestinians were bound in “distorted and unnatural” ways to inflict
“pain and humiliation” amounting to torture.
The report noted instances where prisoners, including a pregnant
woman and a dying man, were shackled while doctors carried out emergency
procedures in a hospital.
According to the report, the doctors violated the Tokyo
Declaration, the key code of medical ethics adopted by the WMA in 1975 that bans
the use of cruel, humiliating or inhuman treatment by physicians.
Ishai Menuchin, the head of the Public
Committee, said his group had been lobbying strenuously against Israeli doctors’
complicity in torture since it issued a report, Ticking Bombs, in 2007, arguing
that torture was routine in Israel.
The Public Committee highlighted the testimonies of nine
Palestinians who had been tortured by interrogators. The report also noted that
in most cases Israeli physicians treating detainees “return their patients to
additional rounds of torture, and remain silent”.
In June last year, Physicians for Human Rights drew the IMA’s
attention to two cases in which the attending doctor failed to report signs of
torture on a Palestinian.
Anat Litvin of Physicians for Human Rights
told the IMA: “We believe that doctors are used by torturers as a safety net –
take them out of the system and torture will be much more difficult to enact.”
The groups stepped up their pressure in February, writing to
Avinoam Reches, the chairman of the IMA’s ethics committee. They demanded that
his association investigate six cases of doctors who failed to report signs of
torture.
In one case, a prison doctor, under pressure from interrogators,
agreed to retract a written recommendation that a detainee be immediately
hospitalised for treatment.
Prof Reches promised to conduct an inquiry. However, last month
the two human rights groups criticised him for failing to investigate their
claims, accusing him of holding only “amicable and unofficial” conversations
over the phone with a few of the doctors concerned.
“We have sent to the IMA many testimonies from victims of torture
who were referred to doctors for treatment,” Dr Menuchin said. “But the IMA has
yet to do anything about it.
“A significant number of doctors in Israel, in detention
facilities and public hospitals, know torture is taking place, but choose to
avert their gaze.”
This month, Defence for Children International issued a report on
the torture of Palestinian children, noting that in several of the cases it
cited, Israeli doctors had turned a blind eye. A boy of 14 who was beaten
repeatedly on a broken arm reported the abuse to a doctor who, he said, replied
only: “I had nothing to do with that.”
The report stated that the group “has not encountered a single
case where an adult in a position of authority, such as a soldier, doctor,
judicial officer or prison staff, has intervened on behalf of a child who was
mistreated”.
Campaigners against Dr Blachar’s appointment as the head of the
WMA say its Israeli sister association’s inaction on torture is unsurprising
given its chairman’s public stance.
Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s
College London, said: “The IMA under Dr Blachar is in collusion with the Israeli
state policy of torture. Its role is to put a benign face on the occupation.”
Dr Blachar told the Israeli website Ynet last week that such
criticisms were “slanderous”, saying he and the IMA denounced all forms of
torture.
The WMA, with nine million members in more than 80 countries, was
established in 1947 as a response to the abuses sanctioned by German and
Japanese doctors during the Second World War.
In 2007, the WMA’s general assembly called on doctors to document
and report all cases of suspected torture.
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