A stain on medical ethics

Although it is clearly proper to condemn doctors' participation or complicity in torture, the medical world must appreciate that torture is more than an unethical practice. It is a heinous international crime which is prohibited under international human rights law, the laws of armed conflict, and customary international law. The prohibition is a non-derogable right under global and regional treaties and a jus cogens norm. If the analyses are accurate, the conflation of the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture's assessment that "what we know is only the tip of an iceberg" with Amnesty International's 70 000 figure for detainees held outside the USA during its so-called war on terror could compute into a massive crime perpetrated on an industrial scale across continents.2 Each victim is entitled to restorative justice, an essential part of which entails seeing the perpetrators punished.