On July 22, 2022 the International Association of Bioethics tweeted out some big news: the next World Congress of Bioethics would be hosted by the Qatari city of Doha, in July 2024. Since 1992, the bi-annual conference has been the preeminent event for researchers, professors, members of the private health and pharmaceutical industry, and others to gather around to discuss big questions about the rights and wrongs of medicine and research. Rapid advancements around the role of public health initiatives in the wake of the COVID pandemic have put an especially bright spotlight on bioethical questions these days.
In past years, the congress has been held in Amsterdam, San Francisco, Sydney, Edinburg and Mexico City. At each convention, hundreds of attendees gathered to take in lectures from preeminent thinkers in the field. Panels discussions weighed in on topics like the best treatment doctors should provide to trans teens, how aggressively the medical community should treat patients with devastating brain injuries, and the ethics of regulating optional plastic surgery.
Never before had the IAB held the event in any country in the Middle East.
“This Congress affords a unique opportunity for the IAB to expand its reach to new regions of the world and to engage with more diverse audiences,” the IAB boasted in an announcement on its website. “IAB welcomes the opportunity to build bridges across cultures, foster mutual learning among bioethicists from around the world, and in the process, fulfill its mission to be an international Association.”
On its own, none of this was particularly big news; medical conferences are regularly held in the Middle East. Qatar itself is scheduled to host the International Conference on Recent Advances in Medical, Medicine and Health Sciences in October. In May, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates will be home to the World Congress on Patient Safety & Nursing Healthcare. That same month, the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases will take place in Egypt.
But Qatar’s role as a host for the world’s biggest conference on bioethics , has brought about a fierce backlash within the academic community. “An excellent place to talk about LGBTI rights, indeed,” tweeted Spanish professor Inigo de Miguel Beriain. (Beriain did not reply to a request from The Daily Beast for comment).
Elsewhere on Twitter, Tereza Hendl, a philosopher and bioethicist at Germany’s University of Augsburg, wrote that the decision to hold the conference in Qatar brought her “sadness, pain and disappointment.”
Hendl added: “Organizing a key congress of bioethics in a country that criminalizes and persecutes LGBTQIA+ people signals that these lives in Qatar and the participation and safety of LGBTQIA+ bioethicists are being compromised for ‘bigger goals’ and this should trouble us on ethical grounds.” (Hendl declined to comment further when contacted by The Daily Beast.)
It’s far from the first time in recent memory Qatar’s laws and policies against LGBTQ people have incited debate over whether it should be allowed to host international events. In the years leading up to the 2022 World Cup and through the event itself, soccer governing body FIFA and the Qatari government were targets of enormous criticism; activists pointed out the government’s anti-LGBTQ policies and FIFA’s ensuing decision to punish players who promised to wear rainbow armbands. And that was on top of allegations over corruption and the treatment of migrant workers brought in for manual labor (some estimates put the death toll of the migrants well into the thousands).
For many, it’s absurd that a conference dedicated to discussing the ethical gray areas of providing medical treatment to the vulnerable be held in a country whose policies are marginalizing and persecuting other vulnerable populations. On one side are those who defend the IAB’s selection, arguing that meeting in Doha helps to expand the reach of the bioethics community’s debates, a goal that can’t be reached by shunning portions of the world whose governments can be distasteful. On the other side are those who raise concerns on everything from Qatar’s human rights record to its disproportionate carbon emissions.
For the most part, the debate has taken on the civil tone one might expect from a field heavily populated by philosophers. Even on Twitter, name calling has been nonexistent. But the back-and-forth has escalated to the point it needed to be formally addressed. In February, a group of academics from three Dutch universities published a letter in the journal Bioethics outlining their concerns.
“I, personally, will not go to countries where I could be arrested for just being who I am.”
— Josh Hyatt, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
Among those concerns were that freedom of speech at the conference could be stifled. In 2020, the government rolled out a new law that would punish “anyone who broadcasts, publishes, or republishes false or biased rumours, statements, or news, or inflammatory propaganda, domestically or abroad, with the intent to harm national interests, stir up public opinion, or infringe on the social system or the public system of the state” with up to three years in prison. The law sparked condemnation from Amnesty International, which has noted that freedom of expression is already severely curtailed by the regime.
The critics also pointed to strict anti-LGBTQ measures, which have included arbitrary detainments, where those arrested faced physical assaults by security officers. They wrote that they feared the conference could be seen as “ethics washing an authoritarian regime,” and that the diversity of the attendees would be limited due to government policies pertaining to LGBTQ people, as well as women, who are subject to strict guardianship laws that strictly curtail what they are able to do both in public and in private.
All of the Dutch academics who authored the letter refused to comment when contacted. But some people who had originally hoped to attend the congress told The Daily Beast they now plan on boycotting after the IAB selected Doha for the host.
“I was surprised that they chose a country that has such an abysmal human rights records relating to the LGBT community specifically, amongst others,” said Josh Hyatt, an associate professor at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences who identifies as gay. “And I, personally, will not go to countries where I could be arrested for just being who I am.”
IAB president Nancy Jecker, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, declined to comment when reached by The Daily Beast. In May, however, she wrote a response to the Dutch letter in Bioethics, published by the same journal. In it, Jecker acknowledged that the ethics of conference geography were important, but countered that if human rights records were to be taken into consideration, 67 countries that criminalize consensual same-sex activity would be immediately ruled out, as would 39 percent of the world that does not have democratic governments.
“Like our colleagues, we seek authentic exchange. However, this cannot occur by shunning countries,” she wrote, adding that the IAB has received guarantees from the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics at Hamad bin Khalifa University, the organization hosting the conference that no restrictions would be placed on subject matter or speech.
In yet another letter to Bioethics, published in May, a group of Qatari ethicists from the university who had led the effort to bring the congress to their country said the criticism was hypocritical, given many European countries bloody histories of colonialism.
“Instead of ‘setting conditions’ whose fulfillment would make a country ‘liberal’ or ‘human rights friend’ enough to host the WCB, we argue that bioethicists should rather engage in intercultural and critical communication,” the Qatari ethicists wrote. “The aim should be to secure a better future for bioethics by ‘ethicizing,’ not ‘politicizing.’”
Mohammed Galy, one of the letter’s authors and founder of the Journal of Islamic Ethics told The Daily Beast that the conference would be unique in that it will include discussions on the intersection of faith, particularly Islam, and bioethics, a subject that had been ignored in previous editions.
“Our main thing was that we will, by having the World Congress in Doha, enhance the global character on the field of bioethics,” he said.
Galy, who is originally from Egypt and has lived and studied in the Netherlands, said he understood the concerns expressed by the Dutch academics, as he had had the same thoughts before taking the job in Qatar.
“We are obliged, morally, to take these concerns seriously and to give our responses to them,” he said.
Some have pointed out that this is not the first time the IAB has opted to hold its convention in a country with a questionable human rights record. In 2006, Beijing was the host city, despite China’s anti-democratic government, limited freedom of speech and persecution of religious minorities while in 2010, the bioethics congress was held in Singapore, a country with strict regulations on freedom of speech and that, at the time, criminalized sexual relations between men.
G. Owen Schaefer, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Biomedical Ethics, not only wishes to attend the Qatar congress, but has submitted an abstract that he hopes will get him a speaking spot. While he wasn’t yet working in Singapore in 2010, he pointed out that the country has hosted the International Conference on Clinical Ethics Consultation in 2017. That conference, said Schaefer, came and went without any large debate or protest.
“We didn’t hear that people wouldn’t want to come because of issues with Singapore or anything like that,” he said. “There wasn’t any such outcry compared to now. We didn’t have editorials in Bioethics raising concern in this area. We didn’t have any problems in terms of censorship or people unable to present material as they saw fit.”
Given that history, Galy agreed it is odd that concerns over human rights records have never before been raised in the history of the World Congress of Bioethics. Because of his experience living in other countries, Galy said he does “understand that some of my Dutch colleagues, British, German, whatever would feel uncomfortable when they hear the name Qatar, or any other Arab or Muslim country. I would understand the same feelings that people here, in this part of the world, would feel uncomfortable about, for instance, United States.
“But is [it] because of racism, or cultural or ethically superior views? I can’t judge this,” said Galy.
It’s ironic that the very location where ethical questions in medicine will be debated has itself become an ethical question—one that is bound to hover heavily over the World Congress of Bioethics next year. It’s unclear yet whether attendance numbers will take a hit, and how the decision may end up affecting confidence and trust in the IAB to continue holding this event. Scientists, doctors, and philosophers will have to sort out the ethics for themselves.
