The Medical Profession and Human Rights: Handbook for a Changing Agenda

Doctors are to good governance what the miner’s canary is to decent air: their testimony is often the first sign that something has gone seriously wrong. For someone like Wendy Orr, who was a South African district surgeon of 24 when she was forced to confront the lax attitude towards abuse of prisoners’ rights in her workplace—the building in which Steve Biko had been tortured—the decision to fight a prevailing medical culture of complacency and passivity was a clear and obvious ethical dilemma. But although this well-structured, comprehensive, and clearly written handbook begins with Wendy Orr’s story in her own words, its theme is that the air is more polluted, and that human rights abuses are more of a problem for practitioners, than we like to think.

The effect of human rights abuses on doctors has broadened in the thirty years since the BMA first began to monitor such issues. Conversely, and more hopefully, the effect of the medical profession on human rights abuses has also deepened. Doctors and their constituent organisations around the globe are more aware of the myriad …