Nature publicou o abaixo-assinado de cientistas exigindo um julgamento justo para os profissionais (cinco enfermeiras búlgaras, entre elas Valentina Siropulo na foto e um médico palestino) acusados pelo governo líbio de contaminarem crianças com o HIV em um hospital. Agora, The Lancet em editorial transcrito abaixo critica o governo líbio. No Brasil, silêncio. Um bom momento para um abaixo-assinado.Leia a história completa na página do Human Rights Watch em
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/11/14/libya12013.htm onde há afirmação de que as confissões entre aspas foram obtidas - surpresa - sob tortura!
Free the Benghazi Six
Their names are largely unknown, and their case has received far too little attention from the international and their own professional communities. Since 1999, five Bulgarian nurses—Valya Chervenyashka, Snezana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Kristiana Valceva—and a Palestinian doctor, Ashraf Ahmad Jum'a, have been the victims of a miscarriage of justice in Libya. In that year, these six, who had been working since 1998 at al-Fatih Children's Hospital in Benghazi, were arrested and charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV, and causing at least 40 deaths.
They were denied legal representation until arriving in court for trial. In prison, according to human rights organisations, they confessed to the charges, after being tortured with electric shocks to their thumbs, tongues, breasts, and genitals; beaten with cables and sticks; menaced by police dogs; deprived of sleep, and raped. Some of the world's leading experts in HIV, including Luc Montagnier, the co-discoverer of HIV as the cause of AIDS, testified, on the basis of case records and genomic analyses done in Europe, that some of the children had been infected before the workers' arrival at the hospital. The HIV infections, the experts concluded, were caused by poor sanitary practices. But this scientific evidence was ultimately thrown out, and in 2004, the six were sentenced to death by firing squad. Nine Libyan health-care workers who were also charged in the case were acquitted. The six foreigners have been on death row ever since. The case was overturned by the Libyan Supreme Court, and a retrial granted. A verdict is expected on Dec 19.
The Lancet unreservedly denounces this miscarriage of justice. A great deal is at stake here, including Libya's political and diplomatic future. Libya must acknowledge that this case has no legal foundation, and then move to correct the conditions that created the whole sorry situation in the first place. Reforming its broken health-care system and ultimately improving the health of its children and indeed all of its citizens, must begin with saving these six lives.
The Lancet
Their names are largely unknown, and their case has received far too little attention from the international and their own professional communities. Since 1999, five Bulgarian nurses—Valya Chervenyashka, Snezana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Kristiana Valceva—and a Palestinian doctor, Ashraf Ahmad Jum'a, have been the victims of a miscarriage of justice in Libya. In that year, these six, who had been working since 1998 at al-Fatih Children's Hospital in Benghazi, were arrested and charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV, and causing at least 40 deaths.
They were denied legal representation until arriving in court for trial. In prison, according to human rights organisations, they confessed to the charges, after being tortured with electric shocks to their thumbs, tongues, breasts, and genitals; beaten with cables and sticks; menaced by police dogs; deprived of sleep, and raped. Some of the world's leading experts in HIV, including Luc Montagnier, the co-discoverer of HIV as the cause of AIDS, testified, on the basis of case records and genomic analyses done in Europe, that some of the children had been infected before the workers' arrival at the hospital. The HIV infections, the experts concluded, were caused by poor sanitary practices. But this scientific evidence was ultimately thrown out, and in 2004, the six were sentenced to death by firing squad. Nine Libyan health-care workers who were also charged in the case were acquitted. The six foreigners have been on death row ever since. The case was overturned by the Libyan Supreme Court, and a retrial granted. A verdict is expected on Dec 19.
The Lancet unreservedly denounces this miscarriage of justice. A great deal is at stake here, including Libya's political and diplomatic future. Libya must acknowledge that this case has no legal foundation, and then move to correct the conditions that created the whole sorry situation in the first place. Reforming its broken health-care system and ultimately improving the health of its children and indeed all of its citizens, must begin with saving these six lives.
The Lancet
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