Last month's reimposition of death sentences on six foreign medical workers for supposedly infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV has caused international condemnation and demands for their conviction to be overturned on appeal.

A Palestinian doctor and five Bulgarian nurses have been in detention since 1999. They were first sentenced to death in May 2004 after being convicted of deliberately infecting 426 children with HIV in Al Fateh Children's Hospital, Benghazi. On 25 December 2005 Libya's Supreme Court ordered a retrial after noting “irregularities” in their interrogations, but the healthcare workers were again found guilty on 19 December 2006 and condemned to death, although their …