Death sentences spark outcry
2004-05-08 13:33
New York - Bulgaria's foreign minister has urged United Nations security council members to help pressure Libya to drop death sentences against five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of intentionally infecting more than 400 children with the Aids virus.
Solomon Passy, meeting with the security council as chair of a European security organisation, said he was seeking to "raise public awareness" of the case as the six await appeals of their sentences of death by firing squad handed down by a Libyan court this week after secretive hearings.
"International public opinion would be helpful in the case," said Passy.
Libyan prosecutors accused the Bulgarians of intentionally infecting more than 400 children with HIV-contaminated blood as part of an experiment to find a cure for Aids.
Twenty-three of the infected children are reported to have died.
'Confessions' came from torture - claims
Another Bulgarian doctor accused in the scandal received four years in prison for changing foreign currency on the black market.
The verdicts have sparked an international outcry. Some human rights groups say Libya concocted the experiment story to cover up unsafe hospital practices.
The medics, who were arrested in 1999, pleaded innocent, but critics said Libyan authorities extracted their confessions by torture.
Under Libyan law, death sentences generate an automatic appeal.
Some European leaders have suggested they were exerting pressure on the government of Muammar Gaddafi to reverse the verdicts.
Gaddafi has been presenting a new image as a member of the world community, renouncing terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
Passy emphasised that Bulgaria, a security council member from 2001 to 2003, had co-sponsored the resolution that lifted UN sanctions on Libya last year.
The lifting came after Gaddafi agreed to pay damages to relatives of passengers killed in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the 1989 bombing of a French jetliner.
Seen as a 'test case' for Libya
He said the appeals would be "a test case for Libya's respect of human rights", adding that he hoped it would "give a chance to Libya to be integrated into the international community".
Passy, chair of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, urged the UN to take advantage of the group's expertise in community policing, monitoring elections and building democratic institutions in conflict areas.
He said OSCE could lend its expertise in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.
"We are ready to respond to requests of the UN to serve if you wish so," he told the council.
- AP