Libya: Sentencing of foreign medical workers - full text
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The supreme court in Tripoli (the capital of Libya) on July 11, 2007, upheld death sentences handed down in 2006 against five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-Bulgarian doctor convicted of deliberately infecting over 400 Libyan children with HIV/AIDS in 1999. On July 17, however, the High Judicial Council, Libya’s highest judicial body, commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment, prompting speculation that the six foreign workers would soon be released from Libyan custody. The ruling on July 17 was made immediately after the Libyan authorities announced that relatives of the infected children had accepted a proposed compensation agreement, thought to be worth around US$1 million per child. On July 24, Libyan President Col Moamer al-Khadafi ordered that the six medical staff be released, and they returned to Bulgaria. The agreement followed talks with officials of the European Commission (EC) and Cecilia Sarkozy, the wife of the President of France. EU officials subsequently announced that they would begin to negotiate EU aid for Libya, an easing of access to European markets, and reduced visa requirements for Libyans travelling to the EU.
Immediate context
The two rulings in July followed the lodging of appeals after the conclusion in December 2006 of a six-month retrial. The retrial resulted in the Bulgarian nurses (all women) and the Palestinian doctor being sentenced to death (by firing squad), after all six were found guilty of intentionally starting a HIV/AIDS epidemic at the El-Fath children's hospital, in the Mediterranean port of Benghazi. The retrial was ordered in December 2005, when the Supreme Court overturned death sentences originally handed down by a lower court in 2004. The foreign workers also lodged appeals against their death sentences in March 2005.
The case against the foreign workers was plagued by controversy, most notably involving accusations that the Libyan authorities had used torture to extract confessions from the defendants. During the retrial, in December 2006, it was also widely reported that leading international scientists had proved that the outbreak of the HIV epidemic started before the foreign workers arrived in Libya.
The accusations of torture led in February 2007 to the opening of a criminal defamation case against the Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor, but a court in Tripoli dismissed those charges in May. Nine Libyan police officers and a doctor were acquitted of torture charges in June 2005.
The Bulgarian government had frequently condemned the trials as “politically motivated” and called for the nurses and doctor to be released, whilst the London-based human rights group Amnesty International in September 2000 reported “serious irregularities in... pre-trial proceedings".
Reaction and outlook
The ruling was widely expected to result in the six foreign workers being released from Libyan custody, under the terms of a prisoner-exchange agreement signed by Libya and Bulgaria in 1984. Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin confirmed on July 17 that the Bulgarian authorities would immediately begin making preparations for the workers to be transferred to Bulgaria, where the case against them would, he said, “come to an end”. Abdel-Rahman Shalqam, the Libyan foreign minister, also on July 17, suggested that the six foreign workers would “benefit” from the 1984 “legal co-operation agreement between Libya and Bulgaria”.
It was thought that the compensation agreement reached on July 17 was being funded by the Benghazi International Fund, which was established in December 2005 and which had received significant political and financial support from the EU and the governments of Bulgaria, Libya, and the USA. In January 2006 relatives of the infected children demanded US$5.9 billion as compensation to settle the case.
Historical Context
The Bulgarian nurses (Kristiyana Valcheva, Nassya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Valya Chervenyashka, and Snezhana Dimitrova) and the Palestinian doctor (Ashraf Gomaa) had always protested their innocence. Their convictions in May 2004 followed the arrest in February 1999 of 19 foreign medical workers in connection with an investigation into how children being treated at the El-Fath children's hospital became infected with HIV (13 of those detained were later released). A total of 426 children were reported to have been infected at the hospital between April 1997 and March 1999 and at least 48 had died.
During the first trial, which opened in February 2000 (before being adjourned on 12 occasions), a group of court-appointed Libyan doctors said that the nurses and the doctor had wilfully infected the children with HIV through blood transfusions. However, Luc Montagnier, the French AIDS expert and co-discover of HIV, testified in September 2003 that poor hygiene and the re-use of infected needles were the most likely cause of the infections. Montagnier said that analysis of blood samples pointed “strongly against” the possibility that the disease had been spread deliberately.
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