The concise argument

Bearing witness

As an editor of a specialist journal like the Journal of Medical Ethics, you sometimes experience a certain ambivalence when authors submit a very good and very important paper, because you feel that the issues raised in the paper ought to get far greater public exposure than your journal is likely to provide. In the present issue, we publish one of those papers. The paper by Deborah Zion and coauthors describe and analyse the ethical problems faced by nurses who worked in the Australian asylum seeker detention system (see page 546). It shows how a system that deprives asylum seekers of most of their rights may also deprive healthcare professionals of the possibility to work in a professional and ethical manner. The description of the conditions under which asylum seekers were detained and nurses expected to work are harrowing and exposes the detention system as rotten and unethical to the core. But the paper also shows how nurses were nevertheless able to resist and to bear witness. In their daily interactions with asylum seekers, they could subvert the inhuman system by bearing witness to the common …