OpenForum – a blog by the Health and Human Rights community

Interrogations, Forced Feedings, and the Role of Health Professionals: New Perspectives on International Human Rights, Humanitarian Law, and Ethics (2009)
Eds. Ryan Goodman, Mindy Jane Roseman

The American public has been bombarded by news articles, memos, and reports about the horrors of torture committed by the U.S. government in their name. The tragic role of health professionals involved in human rights violations in detention centers has also been well documented. Although international human rights law, humanitarian law, and professional ethics codes prohibit the participation of health professionals in torture, such laws and codes are clearly insufficient in practice. What we need now is to reexamine the institutional and structural pressures that have allowed abuses to occur, and move forward from there.

This process has already begun. In January 2008, the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School held a workshop for scholars and practitioners from the military and civilian sectors, including World Medical Association president Yoram Blachar, career intelligence officer Steven M. Kleinman, Physicians for Human Rights president Leonard S. Rubenstein, and others. This book compiles the different perspectives of the workshop participants, providing interdisciplinary analysis and suggestions for institutional reform on two specific and important practices: forced feedings and coercive interrogation. The authors examine cultural frameworks and social situations that affect the faculty of health professionals,  provide ethical and policy analysis, and offer practice guidelines. This book is a must-read for anyone concerned with the participation of doctors and psychologists in torture, and the changes that must be made to ensure that they are held accountable and that abuses do not happen again.

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