The file photo shows a detainee with guards at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
A US doctor and two lawyers have demanded an end to the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike at the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison, calling it a stain on medical ethics.
“Force-feeding a competent person is not the practice of medicine; it is aggravated assault,” experts from the Department of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights at Boston University wrote in an article in the United States’ most famous medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, AFP reported on Wednesday.
“Physicians may not ethically force-feed any competent person, but they must continue to provide beneficial medical care to consenting hunger strikers,” they said.
The authors called for more doctors to speak out against the policies at the infamous prison at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The number of detainees on hunger strike has ballooned in recent months. Currently 104 of the 166 detainees at the prison are on hunger strike and at least 43 of them are being force-fed via tubes snaked up their nose and into their stomach.
The doctors criticized the US military officials’ assertion that force-feeding was needed to save lives.
“Hunger striking is a peaceful political activity to protest terms of detention or prison conditions; it is not a medical condition,” the doctors wrote.
The trio referred to the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Malta, which says that force-feeding a mentally competent person is “a form of inhuman and degrading treatment.”
Earlier this month, the United States dispatched additional soldiers to the prison complex as the number of prisoners going on hunger strike increased.
The authors said more political lobbying is needed to stop the force-feeding, and noted that Guantanamo represents a “stain on medical ethics” that will not fade away.
“American physicians have not widely criticized medical policies at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp that violate medical ethics. We believe they should,” the experts wrote in their piece, titled “Guantanamo Bay: A Medical Ethics-Free Zone?”
“Physicians at Guantanamo cannot permit the military to use them and their medical skills for political purposes and still comply with their ethical obligations,” they noted.
The Guantanamo detention facility was initially established on January 11, 2002 by former US President George W. Bush to hold suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Obama famously promised in early 2009 to close the military’s detention facility within 12 months, but four years on, the controversial prison remains open. He has put the blame on Congress for his failure to make good on his promise.
MN/AS
This article originally appeared on: Press TV