Egyptian Police, shown here arresting a member of a political opposition party in 2007, have been cracking down on gay men in the country. Image from Human Rights Watch.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are leading the protest. They sent a letter to the Egyptian Doctors’ Syndicate and Health Ministry saying that doctors violated medical ethics and doctor-patient privilege by interrogating men jailed on suspicion of being HIV-positive.

Police in Cairo have jailed at least 12 men since October 2007 in a crackdown on HIV-positive and gay men. The crackdown began after a man stopped during an altercation told police he was HIV-positive. The man was then arrested, beaten, and interrogated to find the names of other possibly infected men. The process was repeated with these detainees.

The arrested men, including some who were not found to be infected, were all charged with “habitual practice of debauchery”, which includes consensual gay sex under Egyptian law.

A human rights group found that prosecutors had used medical questionnaires previously completed by the men to prove they were guilty of homosexual acts. The document, found in at least one convicted man’s arrest file, was a Ministry of Health and Population pamphlet titled “Questionnaire for Patients with HIV/AIDS”. It included yes or no questions asking if the men had ever had sexual contact with members of the same sex.

The Egyptian authorities have committed a laundry list of human rights violations during their crackdown. The Ministry of Health forced all detainees to have HIV tests without consent, and forensic doctors conducted forced and abusive anal examinations as “proof” that the men had had gay sex. Not only are these examinations medically and forensically unsound, they also constitute torture under international law.

One prosecutor told one man he was HIV-positive by saying: “People like you should be burnt alive. You do not deserve to live.” Several of the men have said they were beaten in detention by both guards and policemen. All the men who tested HIV-positive were shipped to hospitals where they were chained to their beds for months until human rights activists finally got their chains removed in late February.

Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme, said: "These men have been treated as if they are a national threat simply because four of them were found to be HIV-positive. The authorities should not be prosecuting them, but rather investigating the abuse and ill-treatment meted out against them and taking steps to ensure that such abuse does not happen again."

Human rights groups are appealing to doctors to remember their duty to protect patients and help end these atrocities. Joe Amon, director of the HIV/AIDS Program at Human Rights Watch, said: “Doctors who engage in or enable human rights abuses are violating their most elemental responsibilities.”

“Now more than 100 human rights groups are reminding Egyptian doctors of the oath they took to respect patients’ privacy, autonomy, and consent. This is one of the oldest traditions of medical responsibility, as well as an obligation under human rights law.”