When doctors start civil disobedience it's time to take notice.

Paediatricians at the Lady Cilento Hospital in Brisbane are now entering the sixth day of their protest against the Australian government’s intention to send the young baby of asylum seeker parents back to a refugee detention centre on the Pacific island of Nauru. They believe that the centre cannot provide a safe environment for her, an assertion that is backed by ample evidence. 3 These doctors risk up to two years’ imprisonment under the 2015 Border Force Act for their actions, and yet in seeking to ensure the safety of their patient they are doing nothing more than following their own ethical code. This conflict between today’s law of the land and the right of doctors to do what they think is best for their patients (and in this case let us remember that the patient is a 1 year old baby who has not been convicted of any crime) goes to the heart of the Australian government’s policy of detaining asylum seekers who arrive by boat for indefinite periods in offshore detention centres in impoverished, third world, island nations. Doctors have an ethical code that has been in development since the time of the Hippocratic physicians on the Greek island of Kos nearly 2500 years ago. It was this ethical code that marked out the Hippocratics from their Aesculapian predecessors, and the code’s persistence and development from that time to the present day are proof enough of its importance to us as individuals and to wider society. At some time in our lives we will all be patients, and we all need to be able to have absolute trust in our doctors to do the right thing for us, whatever actions others may wish them to take. Set against this 2500 year old ethical code we now have a recently passed law in Australia, the Border Force Act, that gags healthcare professionals and others involved in caring for asylum seekers and that compels them to follow the instructions of the government, even if they believe that this might be to the detriment of their patients. And, in a double whammy, not only can they be rendered powerless to protect the welfare of their patients as they see it, but they can be imprisoned even for disclosing that fact. Keilloh case