Aims of the BMA's human rights work
Health professionals are amongst the first in society to encounter evidence of human rights violations. Owing to their privileged access to closed institutions, and because of their medical and forensic skills, doctors have always been seen as an essential part of any early warning system about gross abuses of human rights. Increasingly, however, it is recognised that doctors have a role in drawing attention to a more routine erosion of rights occurring in many societies and resulting in the marginalization of vulnerable groups, such as the homeless, detainees and asylum seekers.
The BMA believes that, ethically, health professionals have obligations to try to understand the medical needs and priorities of disadvantaged groups within their own sphere of influence and to make efforts to try and ensure that these are addressed through their professional organizations or by their political representatives.
Aims of the BMA’s human rights work:
- Calling for support for colleagues who are at risk
- To stimulate inter-professional co-operation
- To develop protective measures for health professionals and vulnerable patients
- To facilitate punishment of perpetrators
- To encourage the development of practical guidance
- Widening the debate
- The development of training in human rights and medical ethics
The BMA primarily responds to cases of abuse where doctors or health professionals are involved or where the case clearly involves important health issues. The BMA’s principle activity is restricted to sending letters of enquiry to Heads of State or other relevant senior government officials urging clarification. The Association will also request that the allegations are investigated.
The BMA has an agreed procedure setting out the criteria which warrant the Association intervening. The BMA does not have the capacity to verify all information submitted to it. Any information received must be verified with Amnesty International (AI). No case in which AI believes there to be a significant element of doubt will be pursued. Further information about the criteria for BMA intervention can be found in Appendix B of its human rights handbook.
Letter writing campaigns
Since the early 1980s, the BMA has implemented a letter-writing campaign in response to evidence of abuse of human rights abroad that involved doctors either as victims or collaborators. The vast majority of these campaigns involved the imprisonment, harassment or murder of doctors or other health professionals. More recently, access to appropriate medical care by prisoners or other sick detainees has featured in the BMA’s letters to governments, embassies, international organizations and to sister medical associations.
Amnesty International urgent actions
Amnesty International regularly circulates urgent action appeals, requesting interested parties to write to heads of state and other relevant senior government figures to intervene on behalf of individuals whose rights are being seriously abused. The BMA takes action where doctors or other health professionals are involved, or where the health of the individual concerned is in jeopardy.
http://web.amnesty.org/pages/ua-index-eng
Human rights reports
In 1984 the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting passed a resolution calling for a working party to be set up to investigate allegations that doctors in some parts of the world were co-operating in state torture. Two years later the BMA published its first pamphlet on the topic, The Torture Report. The report found ‘incontrovertible evidence of doctors’ involvement in planning and assisting in torture, not only under duress, but also voluntarily as an exercise of the doctor’s free will.’
As international medical and humanitarian groups learned of the BMA report, a tide of appeals, evidence and testimonies flowed in containing familiar indicators of routine or institutionalized abuse: disappearances of colleagues or patients, unexplained deaths in custody, forensic evidence of beating or torture, the presence of mutilated corpses in police morgues, pressures on doctors to sign the death certificate without examining the corpse.
In 1989, another debate at the BMA’s annual meeting drew attention to this growing body of material and asked for a new working party to review the evidence and produce recommendations for action. This resulted in a more substantial report, Medicine Betrayed,, published in 1992. This was not confined to examining medical involvement in torture but considered the role of doctors in a wide range of human rights violations and in judicially approved procedures such as execution and corporal punishment.
Recognising the growing interest in human rights in the medical profession, and the increasing complexity of a rights-based understanding of both medical practice and the wider determinants of health, the BMA undertook to produce a comprehensive handbook on human rights. This was published in 2001 as The Medical Profession and Human Rights: Handbook for a changing agenda.
This report, running to nearly 600 pages, gives a very clear indication of the scope and complexity of the relationship between human rights and the medical profession throughout the world. It contains chapters on issues ranging from forensic doctors, through trade in organs, weapons, and medical neutrality, to ‘health’ as a human rights objective, and the role of professional associations. It is widely recognized as a benchmark in the field.
A ‘Right to Health’ toolkit.
The British Medical Association, working with the Commonwealth Medical Association (COMMAT), has published a toolkit for health professionals on the practical implications of the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.
The toolkit, funded by a Strategic Grant Agreement from the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID), is aimed at an international health worker audience. It gives health professionals practical advice about the meaning and significance of the right to health, as it appears in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Right to Health toolkit was launched in June 2007 and is available in English, French and Spanish.
Read more about the Right to Health – the history