Testifying to torture: How doctors find the truth

For two decades, physicians with the Asylum Network have used their medical skills to help refugees find safe harbor in the United States.

By Kevin B. O'Reilly, AMNews staff. Dec. 25, 2006.

Allen Keller, MD, remembers the first torture survivor he saw as a physician. He was a resident at the New York University School of Medicine and observed as another physician examined a student activist from an African country who authorities had arrested, beaten and tortured.

"What will happen to you if you return to your country?" Dr. Keller asked.

The man paused. "Then," he said, "I will surely die."

It is this kind of valid fear of persecution based on religion, race, nationality, ethnicity, social group or political opinion that U.S. law recognizes as grounds for granting asylum -- permanent, legal protection from deportation. But the law requires asylum seekers to prove affirmatively that their fears are well grounded -- a daunting prospect for refugees who often flee their homes with little but the clothes on their backs and a set of phony travel documents.

Here is where doctors help those in true need.

Many refugees cannot help but carry the physical and psychological scars of their persecution. The marks of torture come as skin lesions, broken bones or mutilated genitalia. Evidence of torture also presents itself as psychiatric disorders that accompany any violent trauma. Physicians such as Dr. Keller who evaluate asylum seekers can document these sequelae and substantially improve an asylum seeker's chance of finding safe harbor in the United States.

These doctors save lives by testifying to torture.

When asylum seekers claim that they are torture victims, asylum lawyers around the country often tap the Asylum Network, part of the 20-year-old nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights in Cambridge, Mass. The Asylum Network coordinates physician education, training more than 600 physicians using a set of well-established protocols for detecting the physical and psychological symptoms of torture. The group publishes a 200-page handbook for asylum examiners based in part on the so-called Istanbul Protocol, guidelines for documenting torture that the United Nations adopted in 1999. More than 90% of the refugees whom Asylum Network doctors evaluate are granted asylum.