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No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.
International covenants on human rights represent the best of our species but are tragically more known for their lack of implementation. Those of us who have found consolation in using the term ‘medieval’ to describe the Saudi Arabian version of sharia law are now forced to rethink our terminology in the face of twenty-first century water-boarding at Guantanamo Bay, the continued UK willingness to allow big people (adults) to assault small people (children) under the notion of ‘reasonable chastisement’, and the official experimentation with mind-altering substances.
Here is an account of such violation to one man, Frank Olson (Wikipedia; Olson, 2000). He happens to be American. His family continue to suffer.
Fifty-five years ago, on 28 November 1953, Frank Olson died in a New York hotel in what his family was told was an accident. Olson was at the time a US Army scientist investigating biological weapons at the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick in Maryland, and was Acting Head of Special Operations for the CIA. For twenty-two years, between 1953 and 1975, the family knew nothing more about how he died or why. However, on 11 June 1975, they read the Washington Post and received a shock that was to alter their lives. Without naming the dead man, the newspaper provided a different account. The article said a civilian employee of the army took LSD unwittingly, as part of a CIA test, and fell ten floors to his death. The report commented on how the files showing who had been given such drugs unsuspectingly had been destroyed and the CIA had now stopped such activities.