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Experiments on Human Beings as Crimes Against Humanity: From the Nuremberg medical trials to Pfizer case
Sunčana Roksandić Vidlička
orcid.org/0000-0003-3523-6032
; Pravni fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagreb, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Vinko Galiot
; mag. iur.
Sažetak
The metamorphosis of a ‘crime against humanity’ from a core crime addressing the most serious violations of international humanitarian law into one empowering the international community with a tool to respond to the gravest violations of international human rights law warrants consideration which human rights violations justify the stigma of crime against humanity being attached to them. Subsuming mass non-consensual human subject experiments under the category of crimes against humanity has been deemed avant-garde for a long time, even after the Nuremberg trial against Nazi physicians for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by subjecting concentration camps inmates to medical experiments. Linking the Nuremberg trial with the trial against the leading pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer for performing fatal experiments on Nigerian children, the paper reconsiders crimes committed by leading multinational corporations in collusion with national authorities and political elites within the framework of crimes against humanity. While Nazi “medical” crimes represent the most extreme form of mass experiments on civilian population whose only perceived value was to serve as object for obtaining means for exterminating social groups they belonged to, the “modern” context of criminal experiments on human beings is marked by both the appearance of new actors on the international scene – multinational pharmaceutical corporations, and the primacy of a new interest – the economic one. Critically reflecting on the justifiability of placing non-consensual medical experiments on the same level with “classical” modalities of commission of crimes against humanity, the paper examines elements of the crime that might suggest that international criminal law is currently incapable of responding to such criminal practices. The paper traces the emergence of the prohibition of non-consensual experiments in international law by examining the reception of the Nuremberg code, analyzing the causes of reluctance to bind themselves with bioethical instruments that depart from the Nuremberg legacy among precisely those countries whose prior regimes had committed the gravest atrocities by experimenting on people. Even though such crimes today are not committed on people deemed unworthy of living in the name of criminal state ideology, noticeable is the tendency of non-consensual subjection to medical experiments of those perceived less worthy,—i.e., vulnerable groups from the poorest countries—ordinarily in the orchestration of corporations from the wealthiest countries, with at least the tacit consent of authorities in the countries in question, in order to devise medicine for the benefit of groups in the wealthiest countries. The present reflection on the Pfizer case unveils the consequences of not resolving conflicts of interests among the various stakeholders in the process of medical research in favor of human subjects and calls for reconsideration whether there is a proper protection of human subjects by international criminal law
Ključne riječi
medical experiments; crime against humanity; international criminal law; Pfizer case; Nurmberg Doctor’s Trial; Nurember Codex; informed consent
Hrčak ID:
164184
URI
Datum izdavanja:
25.6.2016.
Posjeta: 15.491 *