The Physician's Responsibility, the Physician's Class
The Examination Is Not Done at the Police Station
The Examination Is Not Done at the Police Station: The Physician's Responsibility, the Physician's Class
On the white coat summoned to a custody centre in Mersin, for the young comrades
Summary of the situation
What happened? On the morning of 1 October 2026, in a corruption investigation conducted by the Mersin Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, 59 people were taken into custody, among them the Mayor of Mersin Metropolitan Municipality Vahap Seçer, the Mayor of Mezitli Ahmet Serkan Tuncer, and the Mayor of Yenişehir Abdullah Özyiğit (Medyascope, Euronews).
What has it to do with physicians? According to the statement the Turkish Medical Association (TTB) shared from its X account on 2 October, the Mersin Provincial Directorate of Security and the Provincial Directorate of Health are forcing physicians to go to custody centres and police stations in order to carry out the forensic examinations of those in custody. The text, published with the joint signature of the TTB Central Council, the TTB Human Rights Branch and the Association of Forensic Medicine Specialists, says that this practice is plainly contrary to national legislation and to the international instruments to which Turkey is a party, and it offers physicians a ten-point guide on "what you will do if you are coerced".
Why does it matter? The custody examination is the most basic guarantee against torture. To move the examination into the building where the custody is carried out is to hand the guarantee over to the inspection of the one who carries out the custody. This was tried in Istanbul in March 2025 too, and the TTB said "it is a crime" that day as well (Ankara Medical Chamber, 24 March 2025). That is, not an exception, but a method trying to settle in.
The claim of this piece: The matter is not only the breach of an ethical rule. The physician summoned to the police station is in a position no one can describe as "a member of a liberal profession": a waged public labourer, assigned by the Provincial Directorate of Health, open to being threatened with a disciplinary investigation, measured by performance. What is asked of them is an act of professional independence. This contradiction — the contradiction between the morality of the profession and the dependence of labour — can be resolved not by individual heroism, but only in an organised way. Responsibility is individual; the condition of being able to bear that responsibility is collective.
Now let us go into the detail.
Dear Young Comrades,
When you read a custody story, your eye goes first to the names: Who was taken, from which party, charged with what? In this piece I want you to set those names aside. Because the most lasting side of the event in Mersin is not who was taken into custody, but the question of who will look at the body in custody, where, and under whose watch.
The class reading of municipal tenders, of the sharing of rent, and of the contention between the government and the opposition is the subject of a separate piece. But let us say this at the outset: The procedure set up today for a mayor becomes, tomorrow, the standard for a worker in a strike tent, a student on a campus, a Kurdish youth in a neighbourhood. History has shown us this many times; and that the queue generally works from the other end. Methods are first tried on the least organised, and then climb upward. The police-station examination in Mersin is a method that has climbed as far as the top becoming visible.
1. What is a custody examination for?
Everyone taken into custody is examined by a physician when the custody begins and when it ends. The aim of this is not an innocent procedure such as "checking their health"; the aim is to record whether the body in the state's hands is in the same condition when it leaves the state's hands.
This guarantee has three components:
- Place: The examination is carried out in a health setting independent of the place where the custody is carried out.
- Privacy: The physician and the person examined remain alone together; the law-enforcement officer is not in the room, and the person is not handcuffed or blindfolded.
- Independence: The physician who writes the report does not carry a fear of being punished because of the report's content.
When one of these three is missing, the report ceases to be a guarantee and turns into a document of whitewashing. The hard phrasing in the TTB's statement comes from here: An examination not carried out in accordance with the Istanbul Protocol is assessed, in international ethical norms, as "the concealment of the findings of torture", "the physician's contributing to torture", and "a fault of medical practice".
The legal ground of this rule in Turkey is plain too. The Regulation on Arrest, Taking into Custody and Taking Statements, dated 2005 (Official Gazette, issue 25832), provides that the health check of the person in custody be carried out in a health institution and with physician–patient privacy observed; the Ankara Medical Chamber's 2025 statement sets out these grounds, and their connection with the Code of Criminal Procedure, in detail (ATO).
A box of concepts — the Istanbul Protocol: The "Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment", adopted by the United Nations in 1999 (updated in 2022). It takes its name from Istanbul, because physicians from Turkey, especially the forensic doctors who documented the experience of torture after 12 September, put a great labour into its preparation. Perhaps the most important scientific contribution this country gave the world on the documentation of torture is being trampled in the same country today.
2. What did the TTB say? Ten points, one logic
The most striking side of the TTB statement is that, after stating the principle, it behaves realistically. It does not content itself with saying "a physician should not carry out an examination at the police station"; it sets out what you must do "if, despite all this, you are under intense pressure, under a threat to your own safety":
| Point | Its core |
|---|---|
| 1 | If the person has no consent, there is no examination; the ground for not giving consent goes on record |
| 2 | The conditions of the examination setting, and the identity of everyone in the room, are written in the report; the coercion is reported to the professional organisation |
| 3 | The history is taken in the person's own telling, from the moment of arrest: insult, threat, sleeplessness, thirst, violence |
| 4 | The start and end times of the interview and of the examination are written separately |
| 5 | Even if there is no complaint, all the systems are examined |
| 6 | The findings are documented with a scaled photograph and a diagram |
| 7 | A mental assessment is made: posture, eye contact, tone of voice |
| 8 | If needed, tests are requested (for example urea, creatinine, electrolytes, where it is claimed the person was left without water) |
| 9 | The fit between the history and the findings is assessed; if needed, a forensic-medicine consultation is requested |
| 10 | If the findings are compatible with torture, the diagnosis ICD-10 Y07.3 — "torture carried out by public officials" — is written |
The logic of this list is this: Even in a place where the physician cannot change the conditions, to turn them into the person who records the conditions. If an examination carried out at the police station writes, in the report itself, "this examination was carried out at the police station, in front of these persons, at this hour", it ceases to be a document of whitewashing and turns into a document of admission. The white coat summoned to the custody centre can bear witness even there.
The statement also rests on three instruments of the World Medical Association:
- The Tokyo Declaration (1975): A physician cannot in any way take part in torture, cannot turn a blind eye to it, cannot provide the setting or the means.
- The Declaration on the Professional Independence and Professional Freedom of Physicians: The physician insists on the freedom to act in the patient's interest, whatever the interests of others may be.
- The Hamburg Declaration (1997): Physicians and medical organisations throughout the world are obliged to support the physician who resists the pressure to take part in torture.
This last emphasis of the Hamburg Declaration is the key to the rest of the piece. The physicians of the world had accepted this in 1997: It is not enough to expect a physician, on their own, to resist this pressure. An organisation must stand behind the physician who resists. Why? Because the physician is no longer on their own; they are inside a hierarchy.
3. The physician's class: from a liberal profession to waged labour
In the classic account the physician is "a member of a liberal profession": their own surgery, their own patient, their own calendar. This figure stands, on the class map, close to the petty bourgeoisie: a specialist who owns their own means of production (the surgery, the instruments, the knowledge), who sells their own labour themselves, who works under no one's orders.
In Turkey this figure has changed in a radical way over the last forty years, especially with the Health Transformation Programme that began in 2003:
- The surgeries largely closed; the overwhelming majority of physicians work for a wage in public or private hospitals.
- An important part of the wage was tied to the performance score: how many patients you saw, how many procedures you did. The physician's labour came to be measured by the piece.
- Appointment systems, five-minute examination times and measurements of patient satisfaction are the form, in health, of mental Taylorism: the work of making a diagnosis was reduced to a standard procedure managed by the clock and by the score. The slogan the TTB has been saying for years, "medicine cannot be practised in five minutes", is precisely the worker's objection to this process.
- With the chains of private hospitals and the city-hospitals model, health became a direct field of the accumulation of capital. The physician is now selling not their own labour, but a labour that serves the valorisation of someone else's capital.
- The result: violence in health, burnout, the widespread physician work stoppages of 2022, and thousands of physicians every year taking the papers to emigrate abroad.
In short, the physician is a proletarianised specialist labourer. Their knowledge is still of high value, and rare; this gives them a bargaining power and a social status. But they decide less and less for themselves under what conditions, in whose hierarchy, and by what measures they will use this knowledge.
| The old description: "the physician, member of a liberal profession" | Today's reality: "the waged specialist labourer" |
|---|---|
| Their own surgery, their own instruments | The instruments of the public or private hospital |
| They set the fee with the patient themselves | The state or the boss sets the fee, and ties it to performance |
| The working time and the number of patients are their decision | The appointment system and the quotas decide |
| Professional autonomy is backed by economic independence | Professional autonomy stays on paper; economic dependence is real |
| The price of saying "no": losing a patient | The price of saying "no": a disciplinary investigation, exile, removal from post |
| Ethics, a question of individual conscience | Ethics, a question of organisation |
The event in Mersin has to be read through the right-hand column of this table.
4. The white coat summoned to the station: between ethics and the order
What is happening in Mersin is this: The Provincial Directorate of Health, that is the administrative superior to whom the physician is attached, together with the Directorate of Security, "assigns" the physician to the police station. Two obligations stand before the physician:
- Professional ethics and the law: The examination is not done at the police station. If you do it, tomorrow your signature will be under a report that covers claims of torture.
- The administrative hierarchy: If you do not comply with the assignment, a disciplinary investigation can be opened for "disobedience to an order", your record can be damaged, you can be sent somewhere else by rotation.
What the state does is to load the tension between these two obligations onto the physician's own back. It is the administration that commits the violation institutionally; it is the physician who will bear the responsibility for the result individually. This is a familiar move of capitalist work organisation: the decision is taken above, the risk is dumped below. The boss who does not give the work-safety equipment in the factory says, after the accident, "the worker did not follow the rule"; the administration that sends a physician to the custody centre will say, tomorrow, if a claim of torture comes out, "the physician wrote the report".
There is a point here that the young comrades must grasp well: The physician's responsibility is real, and it cannot be transferred. The defence "I was given an order" has not been accepted in medical ethics since Nuremberg; the trial of the Nazi physicians is one of the founding moments of modern medical ethics. The physicians who wrote the report "he is sound" in the torture-houses of 12 September were a part of the torture. A physician's signature is never neutral.
But the responsibility's being real requires that the conditions of being able to bear it are real too. To expect a physician, on their own, as a waged labourer, to resist their administrative superior and the police is like expecting a worker, on their own, to strike against their boss without a union. Some do it, they do it heroically, they pay the price. But a system is protected not by heroism, but by collective guarantees.
The second of the TTB's ten points matters for this reason: "The physician must report to the professional organisation all the difficulties and coercions they live through in the processes of medical assessment." This is the sentence that binds individual conscience to organisational power.
5. Why is the professional organisation a target?
That the TTB can even make this statement is a gain of struggle. Let us remember the attacks on the TTB in recent years:
- Prof. Dr Şebnem Korur Fincancı, president of the TTB Central Council and a forensic-medicine specialist who laboured in the preparation of the Istanbul Protocol, was detained in October 2022 because she asked for an independent investigation of the claims of chemical-weapon use, and she was sentenced for "propaganda for a terrorist organisation".
- In the same process a case was opened for the removal of the TTB Central Council from office; the political campaign that accused the professional organisation of "going outside its legal limits" went on.
- Today too the TTB is having to ask that the forensic-medicine specialists taken into custody because of their views in the Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu investigation be tried without detention: "Science cannot be done in the shadow of the fear of custody" (Haberler.com).
The common line in this picture is plain: Power wants the physician's knowledge, but it does not want the physician's independence. It wants the report, and it does not want to leave in the physician the right to decide the report's content. Forensic medicine, the documentation of torture, a claim of chemical weapons, a corruption investigation... In whatever field it may be, the moment scientific testimony contradicts power's account, the witness turns into a "suspect".
There is a class logic here. The capitalist state wants specialist labour (the physician, the engineer, the teacher, the journalist, the programmer) in two forms: on the one hand it wants to use the knowledge and the legitimacy this labour produces; on the other it fears this labour speaking by its own professional measures — that is, by a measure of truth independent of the state. Professional organisations are the places where specialist labourers can defend this independent measure collectively. This is why they are a target.
A box of concepts — professional organisation and union: The TTB is a professional body with the character of a public institution; membership is compulsory, it sets the ethical rules, and it has disciplinary authority. A union is a workers' organisation that bargains collectively for the wage and the working conditions. In health in Turkey, both exist. The physician's ethical independence (the field of the professional organisation) and job security (the field of the union) pass into each other in the Mersin example: the price of an ethical "no" is the insecurity of the job. This problem is not solved without thinking of the two together.
6. In whose hands, under whose inspection, for whose benefit?
Let us ask this blog's familiar three questions of the custody examination.
In whose hands? The examination of the body in custody is, where it ought to be, in the hands of an independent health institution and of the physician. With the Mersin practice, this is passing, in effect, to the police's space and to the administrative order of the Provincial Directorate of Health.
Under whose inspection? If there is a security officer in the examination room, if the person is handcuffed, if the physician fears how their report will be read, the inspection is the police's, not the physician's. If there is no privacy, there is no testimony either.
For whose benefit? An independent examination is for the benefit of the one who is weakest before the state, that is, of the person in custody. The police-station examination is for the benefit of the one who carries out the custody, of their being able to say "everything was done in accordance with procedure". The person in custody today may be a mayor. But the place where this procedure will be used the most is the custody of the worker, the student, the migrant, the Kurdish citizen, who has no camera and no army of lawyers.
Another face of the same operation shows how well placed these questions are: the images of a woman who opened the door in her pyjamas in the morning raid being filmed and served up, despite the objection "would you close it" (Kısa Dalga). The camera at the door and the examination at the station are the two ends of the same logic: the body and the privacy of the person in custody are turning into the state's field of display and of inspection. The physician's examination is the last door that has to stay outside this field.
7. The physician's responsibility: three layers
How, then, should we describe the physician's responsibility? I propose thinking of it in three layers.
The first layer — individual ethical responsibility. The physician is responsible for the truth of the report they sign. If they are being forced to carry out an examination at the police station, it is their obligation to write this in their report, to take consent, to record the person's account in full, and, if there is a finding of torture, to enter the diagnosis Y07.3. There is no escape from this layer.
The second layer — professional and collective responsibility. The physician is responsible for reporting the pressure they live through to the professional organisation, and for supporting their colleague's resistance. The Hamburg Declaration loads this onto the whole medical community. If a physician who refuses to go to the police station is left alone, the next physician agrees to go.
The third layer — social and class responsibility. The physician is responsible for knowing that the prohibition of torture is a guarantee for all the labourers of a society, and for standing on the side of those who defend this prohibition. The Turkey Human Rights Foundation, founded together in 1990 by the TTB and the Human Rights Association, was the institutional expression of this layer: physicians took on, as a professional duty, facing the torture legacy of 12 September.
These three layers are bound to one another. Without the second and the third layer, the first layer turns the physician into a hero alone, or into a victim alone. Without the first layer, the other two are an empty text of a statement.
8. Questions and answers for the young comrades
"But those in custody are accused of corruption; why should we trouble ourselves with their rights?" Because custody guarantees work not according to the charge, but according to the person. Every practice that pierces the guarantee for a person of whom it is said today "they deserved it" becomes, tomorrow, the settled procedure for the worker who strikes. There is no contradiction between wanting the claims of corruption to be investigated seriously and wanting human dignity to be protected in custody. The real contradiction is trying to do the first by trampling the second.
"Why does the physician not simply refuse?" Because they are a waged labourer. The price of refusing is discipline, exile, the record, and sometimes a criminal investigation. The TTB's writing the points on "what you will do if you are coerced" is the sign of realism. The right question is not "why does the physician not refuse", it is "what organisational power is needed for the physician to be able to refuse".
"Is this not only the physicians' affair?" No. The same structure exists in all specialist labourers: the engineer who writes an expert report, the inspector who writes an audit report, the journalist who writes the news, the programmer who writes the algorithm. Knowledge is wanted from all of them; independence is not. The physician's situation at the police station is the most naked example of the general situation of specialist labour before the capitalist state.
9. Concrete tasks
Let this piece not remain an expression of feeling. Who can do what?
For physicians and medical students:
- Carry the TTB's ten-point guide in your pocket; share it with your colleagues on the shift.
- When you are given an assignment to a police station or a custody centre, first inform, in writing, the institution you are attached to and your medical chamber.
- Be sure to write in your report the conditions of the examination, the identities of those in the room, and the times. The report is your testimony.
- See membership of the professional organisation not as a formality but as a collective guarantee; think of union organisation with the same seriousness.
For the other health labourers:
- Nurse, health technician, emergency medical technician: you are there too in the custody examination. Your testimony matters too; report the pressure to your union.
For lawyers, law students and rights organisations:
- Object to custody reports drawn up at the police station on the ground of the conditions of the examination; put the report's breach of procedure into the file.
- Document the situation of the physicians assigned with this practice in Mersin, and of the persons examined.
For everyone:
- Make it a habit, in custody news, to ask the question "where was the examination carried out?"
- Answer the attacks on professional organisations, whatever profession you are from, with class solidarity.
The place of the white coat
Inside the police station, the white coat is an accessory in the state's hands. In the hospital's examination room, the door closed, the handcuffs undone, with only the patient opposite, the same coat is a garment of testimony.
A physician can no longer decide on their own in which room they will put on their coat; to know this is painful, but it is true. But physicians, health labourers, and all the labourers who support them, together, can decide that that coat will not enter the police station. The whole accumulation of medical ethics, from Tokyo to Hamburg, from the Istanbul Protocol to today, is built on this decision being able to be taken not alone, but together.
The examination is not done at the police station. If one physician says this, it is courage. If all physicians say it, it is a rule. If all labourers say it, it is a guarantee.
Sources
- Turkish Medical Association, "It Is Unacceptable That Our Colleagues Are Forced into Forensic Examination in Custody Centres!", X, 2 October 2026 — x.com/ttborgtr/status/2105957155798983021
- Evrensel, "The TTB's reaction to the forensic-examination practice in Mersin: 'Physicians cannot be forced to examine in custody centres'" — evrensel.net
- Medyascope, "An operation against three municipalities in Mersin: 59 people in custody, Vahap Seçer among them", 1 October 2026 — medyascope.tv
- Euronews Türkçe, "An operation against three municipalities in Mersin", 1 October 2026 — tr.euronews.com
- Kısa Dalga, "The privacy argument in the Mersin operation: who served up the images?" — kisadalga.net
- Turkish Medical Association, "Carrying Out Custody Examinations in Police Units Is a Crime, It Is Unacceptable!", March 2025 — ttb.org.tr
- ANKA, "Turkish Medical Association: custody examinations cannot be carried out in the places where the persons are held in custody" — ankahaber.net
- Ankara Medical Chamber, "Physician Assignments for the Purpose of Carrying Out the Forensic Control Examinations of Those Taken into Custody Outside a Health Institution", 24 March 2025 — ato.org.tr
- Haberler.com, "The TTB asked that the forensic-medicine specialists in the Yazıcıoğlu investigation be tried without detention" — haberler.com
- Turkish Medical Association, "Medicine Is Not Practised in Five Minutes, Health Does Not Fit into Five Minutes!" — ttb.org.tr
- Turkish Medical Association, the Rules of Medical Professional Ethics — ttb.org.tr
- Ethics Board of the Turkish Medical Association, "Opinion of the Ethics Board on the Right to Health of Those Deprived of Their Liberty" — ttb.org.tr
- World Medical Association, the Tokyo Declaration (1975), the Hamburg Declaration (1997), the Declaration on the Professional Independence and Professional Freedom of Physicians
- UN, the Istanbul Protocol (1999; the 2022 revision)
