Should doctors boycott working in Australia’s immigration detention centres?

Yes—David Berger

Australia’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, including mandatory detention of children on foreign islands, has reached a watershed. Doctors are having to resort to civil disobedience to meet their professional and ethical obligations towards patients, unprecedented in a contemporary Western democracy.1

Since 2015’s Border Force Act, healthcare professionals have risked imprisonment to speak out about appalling conditions in centres that have been likened to gulags and concentration camps.2 3

In February 2016 doctors at Brisbane’s Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital also defied the act by refusing to discharge a baby in what may turn out to be a failed bid to prevent her being sent back to Nauru.4

The president of the Australian Medical Association, Brian Owler, has recently denounced Australia’s appalling treatment of asylum seekers, calling it “state-sanctioned child abuse.”5 But he stopped short of calling for a medical boycott of these facilities because, he said, it is less evil to be inside the system bearing witness and providing medical care, adding that public opinion would not support such a boycott.

But doctors cannot work ethically within the present system; to argue otherwise is wilful blindness, which history tells us will not be judged kindly by future historians.