Human Rights Watch also interviewed doctors and medical personal about the use of anal exams, and sought the opinions of forensic specialists from around the world. The report is based on interviews with 32 men and transgender women who underwent forced anal examinations. We have also received reports of the use of forced anal exams by police in Syria, which we have not independently verified. This report compiles evidence of the use of forced anal exams in eight countries: Cameroon, Egypt, Kenya, Lebanon, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, and Zambia. Medical personnel who conduct forced anal exams do so in violation of international principles of medical ethics, including the prohibition on medical personnel participating in any way in acts of torture or degrading treatment. Human Rights Watch believes that they are a form of sexual assault. Several victims told Human Rights Watch that they experienced forced anal examinations as a form of sexual violence. Some people subjected to these examinations experience lasting psychological trauma. As the UN Committee against Torture has emphasized, they “have no medical justification and cannot be consented to fully.” Forced anal exams are invasive, intrusive, and profoundly humiliating. They violate the Convention against Torture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the African Convention on Human and Peoples' Rights.
This argument is based on long-discredited 19 th century science: the overwhelming weight of medical and scientific opinion holds that it is impossible to use these exams to determine whether a person has regularly engaged in same-sex conduct.įorced anal examinations are a form of cruel, degrading, and inhuman treatment that can rise to the level of torture. Law enforcement officials and some medical personnel claim that by doing so they can determine the tone of the anal sphincter or the shape of the anus and draw conclusions as to whether or not the accused person has engaged in homosexual conduct. These examinations often involve doctors or other medical personnel forcibly inserting their fingers, and sometimes other objects, into the anus of the accused. In at least eight countries in which consensual same-sex conduct is criminalized, law enforcement officials working in tandem with medical personnel subject men and transgender women who are arrested on homosexuality-related charges to forced anal examinations, with the purported objective of finding “proof” of homosexual conduct.