GAY TORTURE ANAL EXAMS STILL USED IN LEBANON
Despite a medical ban, it’s been revealed that a Lebanese doctor is still ‘testing’ gay men using discredited forced anal exams.
While the Lebanese Order of Physicians outlawed the practice in 2012, a Beirut-based NGO documented in the latest edition of its newsletter five cases in which a doctor had conducted the tests.
According to The Daily Star, the doctor, identified only as A.M. by the group, was reportedly hired by the judicial police’s Moral Protection Bureau in January to “test” five Lebanese and Syrian men who had been arrested in Lebanon on suspicion of homosexuality.
“We are asking the Order of Physicians to sue him [the doctor] for professional misconduct,” Legal Agenda’s Nizar Saghieh told The Daily Star.
“There are many sanctions available, so it is up to the people who are hearing this case to decide on what is adequate.”
Last year, Human Rights Watch documented numerous cases in which the Lebanese Internal Security Forces forced men accused of having gay sex to undergo the humiliating tests to assess if they had anal sex.
The tests involve inserting an egg-shaped metal object into the rectum of the “suspect.”
Known as ‘tests of shame’ in Lebanon, they have been discredited by medical experts as being medically and scientifically useless and have been equated to torture by human rights groups. The practice is also in violation of international professional medical principles.
Similar tests have reportedly been used in the arrest and prosecution of men accused of homosexuality in other countries, include Zambia and Uganda.
The Lebanese Penal Code prohibits having sexual relations that contradict “the laws of nature”, which is punishable by up to a year in prison.
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