Forensic Archive of Iran

Medical Ethics Under Siege in Iran By Professor @KiaAramesh, MD, PhD. One of the most fundamental principles of medical ethics is the protection of human life and dignity, especially in times of vulnerability, illness, and injury. Hospitals, healthcare professionals, and medical services are meant to remain neutral, safe, and protected spaces, even in situations of political conflict or social unrest. Yet today, in Iran, these basic and universally accepted principles are being systematically violated by the state. Reports from inside the country document a horrifying pattern: hospitals being attacked; injured protesters being arrested from their hospital beds; patients being killed while receiving care; healthcare professionals and medical students being threatened, detained, imprisoned, or even killed; ambulances being used to transport security forces rather than patients; and, in some cases, hospitals and ambulances being used as sites from which protesters are targeted and shot. These actions represent not only grave human rights violations but a direct assault on the very foundations of medical ethics. Tragically, the medical ethics community inside Iran is largely voiceless and paralyzed. This is mostly due to structural repression: pervasive state control, dependence on government institutions, lack of an independent civil society, infiltration of academic and professional bodies by security agents, mass surveillance, and internet shutdowns that isolate professionals from the global community. In such conditions, silence is not consent; it is imposed. This places a moral responsibility on the international bioethics and medical ethics community. When medical neutrality is violated so blatantly, when hospitals become extensions of state violence, and when healthcare professionals are persecuted for doing their jobs, global ethical institutions cannot remain neutral or passive. Bioethics is not merely an academic discipline. It is a moral practice grounded in the defense of life, dignity, and justice. Remaining silent in the face of such systematic brutality risks turning bioethics itself into an empty rhetoric, detached from the realities it claims to address. If medical ethics means anything at all, it must mean speaking out when medicine is weaponized against the very people it is meant to protect. This is a call to action. International bioethics organizations, academic centers, professional associations, journals, and leading figures in the field must break the silence. They must issue public statements, document these violations, support endangered healthcare professionals, and hold the Iranian regime accountable through ethical, legal, and institutional channels. Silence, in this context, is not neutrality; It is complicity. The credibility of global bioethics now depends on whether it is willing to defend its own principles when they are most violently violated.