Human rights activists condemn protesting doctors

The doctors were responding to the government's heavyhanded methods of dispersing antigovernment crowds in front of the Parliament building earlier this week, which led to two deaths and hundreds of injuries.

The critics said such action by medical professionals was tantamount to violating patients' right to life.

"I don't agree with such a stance, because this profession has a duty to look after the lives of others, so denying treatment to patients shows disrespect for the physicians' own ethics," said leading humanrights lawyer Pairote Polpeth, who is also chairman of the NGO Coordinating Committee, Thailand's biggest umbrella body for nongovernmental organisations.

"Doctors must treat patients even if they are enemy combatants in war."

Pairote said the doctors could express their political views, condemn the actions of police by making public statements or join People's Alliance for Democracy rallies, but at the end of the day, they had to treat their patients - be they police or destitute people - because their job was to save lives.

He was also reacting to a defence of the doctor's threat by a top member of the Medical Council of Thailand who said the doctors were merely exercising their right to stage civil disobedience, that they could be impolite to the police, but doctors would not abandon those in need of emergency treatment.

"There can be no civil disobedience when it comes to life and death," Pairote said.

Humanrights defender Pokpong Lawansiri led a signature hunt of educational institutes yesterday that found more than 80 people to support a statement denouncing the doctors for saying they would refuse to treat police.

"This is a serious violation of human rights," Pokpong told The Nation yesterday. "It's clearly an act of discrimination and is against medical ethics."

He urged medical professionals to separate their political opinion from their professional duties and warned that their rationale was a slippery slope. It could, for example, lead to a progovernment university professor giving a failing mark to a student who was the son of such a medical professional.

Pokpong said doctors could wear black to mourn or protest by issuing statements condemning both the police and the government but that they should hold sacred above all else their duty to save lives.

Part of the Physician's Oath, adopted by World Medical Association's general assembly in 1948, reads: "I will not permit considerations of religion, nationality, race, party politics or social standing to intervene between my duty and my patient."

One senior humanrights lawyer sympathetic to the doctors urged those criticising them to be gentle in their tone. He said the doctors meant well and wanted to protect democracy. They would be disheartened if they were condemned.