Aside from write-ups in the New York Times and the journal Nature, there has been very little in the media recently concerning the plight of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who face death sentences in Libya. The six are charged with deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV, the AIDS virus, in 1998. The charges are nothing more than “preposterous” says the NYT, given that infections appeared before these medics began work at the hospital in question! The NYT suggests that this “looming miscarriage of justice demands a strong warning to the Libyan leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, that his efforts to join the ranks of peaceable nations will suffer if the medical workers are made the scapegoats for the failure of Libya’s own health system.” The evidence points to wholly inadequate hygiene as being to blame rather than the accused individuals.
Nature reported in September that defence lawyers working for the six medical workers have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics’ innocence. We should expect nothing less, yet there has apparently been no outcry, no figurative call to arms among biomedical scientists outraged by this state of affairs. Conversely, almost 80,000 people have registered an interest in hearing the results of the Steorn Challenge and dozens of scientists have been called on to help the company validate its findings of new form of energy production. If such a publicity campaign and dozens of reports across the blogosphere can raise such momentum regarding what appears to be a perpetual motion machine, then surely scientists and bloggers across the world can be drawn to this far more critical scientific cause.
The six medics were arrested in 1999. Confessions were wrought from each of them under torture according to human rights organisations, but the individuals later retracted their statements. It seems to be beyond doubt that the six are not guilty yet they have been under a death sentence since 2004. Nature suggests that the silence of scientists over this case is due to a hope that diplomacy might resolve the issue. After all, the NYT reports, the White House currently has Libya on a pedestal as an ideal state that no longer abides weapons of mass destruction.
However, should the firing squads raises arms against those six medics, without a fair, scientifically based trial, then Libya’s position on that pedestal will come crashing down just as quickly as if it were yet another rogue state harbouring WMD.
Fellow science blogger and journalist Declan Butler, who alerted me to this state of affairs, points out that AAAS and other scientific bodies have begun to respond. The Nature leaders on this are available as pdfs – Libya1 and Libya2.