Australia and the Nauru files: doctors fighting for the human rights of asylum seekers Life & Times Can doctors successfully challenge the state when medical ethics are crushed by perceived national interest? And if it's not our own state that's doing the crushing, should we care? 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' (Martin Luther King Jr, Letter from Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963) NO ENTRY In 2013, desperate to curb arrivals by sea, Australia declared that no asylum seeker arriving by boat would ever settle on Australian soil. Instead, they are sent for 'offshore processing' at detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island. Even when granted refugee status, they effectively have nowhere to go. The United Nations (UN) call this illegal: Australia's actions contravene international treaties they have long since signed. 1 There are around 1200 asylum seekers on Nauru and 900 on Manus Island, from a variety of Middle Eastern, African, and Asian countries. Many are children and conditions are dreadful. Leaked case files, 2 two senate reports, and the UN have detailed child abuse, 3 sexual violence, assault, mental illness, self-harm, suicide, and murder (by guards). 4 Doctors describe medical conditions as grossly inadequate. 5 An independent medical panel recommended that the standard of medical care should be to Australian, not local, standards, but they were promptly disbanded.

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Our ethical obligations to patients are sometimes overridden by the state, but as a profession we're generally OK with this. Good medical practice doesn't expect us to protect the confession of a murderer, or disobey the direction of a judge. But what would we do if the state required something of our profession that overrode our ethical judgement? Would we fight, fudge, or fold?

The retention and display of the remains of Charles Byrne, an Irishman with acromegaly, by the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons has been contentious for some years, and the moral case for his release for burial has been repeatedly made. This article makes the legal case through five arguments. The first three concern common law rights and duties; Byrne’s right to burial, the duty of the State to ensure his burial where others do not, and the right of his friends to assume that duty. The fourth concerns Byrne’s common law right to direct his disposal, and, related to this, not to be retained and displayed. The fifth, which underpins the rest, is that Byrne is not, and has never been property, and it is in fact intuitively and legally arguable that he, like other corpses, remains a person. The article finally outlines three options available to those wishing to ensure Byrne finally has the burial at sea that he sought to ensure in 1783.