Category: Justice

{A Scots nurse who survived Ebola will not face charges of dishonesty at a misconduct hearing.}

Pauline Cafferkey, 40, was infected while working in Sierra Leone in 2014.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) is alleging that Ms Cafferkey allowed a wrong temperature to be recorded when she returned to Heathrow and she left a screening area without flagging it up.

But it said she had no case to answer over dishonesty and that her judgement had been impaired due to illness.

The panel at the conduct and competence committee agreed to drop charges about “dishonesty” after the NMC agreed that medical evidence clearly showed Ms Cafferkey’s decision-making was impaired due to illness on her return from Sierra Leone.

This means that the NMC will now make submission on two charges relating to Ms Cafferkey on her return to the UK on 28 December 2014.

The first alleges that while in a Public Health England screening area, inside Terminal 4 at Heathrow, she allowed an incorrect temperature to be recorded on her screening form.

The second charge alleges that she left the screening area without reporting her true temperature to medics.

During Tuesday’s morning session, the panel heard that the screening area at Heathrow airport was “busy, disorganised and even chaotic” when Ms Cafferkey and other medics arrived back from Sierra Leone.

The agreed facts in the case, as presented to the panel, show that the nurse’s temperature was recorded twice by a doctor at Heathrow at more than 38C. This was in the presence of another person referred to as “registrant A”.

The doctor claims that “registrant A stated at this point that she would record the temperature as 37.2C on Ms Cafferkey’s screening form and then they would ‘get out of there and sort it out’”.

The agreed facts show that Ms Cafferkey stated that she recalled the words “let’s get out of here” being used but could not remember who said it or who entered the temperature on her screening form.

The panel was told that Ms Cafferkey accepted that her temperature had been measured at above 38C yet allowed a reading of 37.2C to be recorded on her screening form, after which she continued to the arrivals area.

It was heard that a temperature above 37.5C “is an elevated or pyrexial (feverish) temperature that requires further assessment and should be reported to a consultant”.
‘Severe viral load’

Ms Cafferkey admitted taking paracetamol at some point after she realised she had an elevated temperature.

When she returned to the screening area, the doctor who examined her found her temperature to be normal and cleared the nurse to fly back to Scotland.

The panel heard that hours later she was diagnosed with one of the most severe viral loads of Ebola ever recorded.

Doctors said early symptoms would have impaired her judgement and that there was no evidence she had been deliberately dishonest to staff.

At the hearing, the NMC’s representative said there was no question that Ms Cafferkey and other Ebola doctors were acting for the public good.

But she said they had to ensure they did not cause any risk to others.

She said Ms Cafferkey would have understood the importance of temperature checks and the expectation was that a nurse should “fully cooperate” and disclose her symptoms.

The NMC rep said there were “significant mitigating factors” but the fact Ms Cafferkey did not disclose a symptom of Ebola still “amounts to misconduct”.

She said Ms Cafferkey was guilty of “unacceptable professional behaviour” by potentially putting the public at risk.

Pauline Cafferkey’s lawyer, Joyce Cullen, argued that her actions did not amount to misconduct.

She said the nurse should be viewed as a patient from the moment the first doctor took her temperature.

She added that Ms Cafferkey “was not acting in a professional capacity” when the incorrect temperature was recorded at Heathrow.

Ms Cafferkey’s lawyer pointed to past definitions of misconduct as “usually involving” dishonesty.

She said Ms Cafferkey’s ability to assess her own medical condition and make decisions was likely to have been “substantially impaired”.

The lawyer said Ms Cafferkey was an Ebola expert with “impeccable record” and it was “so unlikely” that her actions were deliberate.

She also pointed to the “chaotic” scenes at the Heathrow airport screening process.

The NMC had originally alleged that Ms Cafferkey “allowed an incorrect temperature to be recorded” on 28 December 2014 and intended to conceal from Public Health England staff that she had a temperature higher than 38C.

The nurse, from Halfway, Cambuslang, contracted the virus while working as part of a British team at the Kerry Town Ebola treatment centre in 2014.

She spent almost a month in isolation at the Royal Free at the beginning of 2015 after the virus was detected when she arrived back in the UK.

Ms Cafferkey was later discharged after apparently making a full recovery, and in March 2015 returned to work as a public health nurse at Blantyre Health Centre in South Lanarkshire.

In October last year it was discovered that Ebola was still present in her body, with health officials later confirming she had been diagnosed with meningitis caused by the virus.

However in the months that followed, her health suffered as she had issues with her thyroid, her hair fell out and she had headaches and pains in her joints.

But Ms Cafferkey stressed that she felt lucky because she had not lost her sight as others had done.

The hearing was adjourned until Wednesday.

{Abdullah’s Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms has acted as legal counsel to family of murdered Italian Giulio Regeni.}

The human rights activist Ahmad Abdullah has been freed after almost 140 days in pre-trial detention in Egypt.

Abdullah, the head of the board of trustees of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF), was arrested at his home prior to planned protests against the transfer of two islands to Saudi Arabia on the 25 April. He remains accused of various charges that could still result in him being jailed for life. They include the incitement of violence, calls to overthrow the regime and belonging to a terrorist group.

Mohammed Lotfy, the executive director of ECRF, said that while Abdullah’s release was a positive development, “it should be followed by dropping all trumped up charges brought against him”. Abdullah is currently out on bail.

ECRF tracks forced disappearances in Egypt, which have spiked since Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi came to power in 2013. Lawyers connected to ECRF are also acting as the Egyptian legal counsel for the family of murdered Italian Giulio Regeni, whose body bearing signs of torture was found on a desert road outside Cairo in early February.

Egyptian police ‘investigated’ Giulio Regeni days before his murder
Read more
“Solidarity with Ahmad Abdullah … has contributed to his liberation, in particular from the family of Giulio Regeni,” said Lotfy. “ECRF will continue to fight for the truth for Giulio Regeni and in uncovering the fate of Egyptians who fall victim to forced disappearances.”

Abdullah’s release comes days after Egyptian investigators visited Rome to discuss developments in the Regeni case. Egypt’s prosecutor general, Nabil Sadek, stated following the meeting that police had investigated a tip from the head of the Egyptian street vendors union concerning Regeni over a period of three days in January, in the weeks prior to the 28-year-old’s disappearance.

Mohammed Abdullah, the head of the union, was later quoted in local media reports as denying that he tipped off the police. Reached by phone by the Guardian, he explained that “Regeni spoke to me about things which I thought were of concern to national security”. Asked what these things were, he repeatedly said “I can’t say”, as the case is currently with the prosecutor’s office.

Mohammed Abdullah is one of five individuals whose phone records were handed to Italian officials in May this year, part of a requested package of call records and CCTV footage of the area where Regeni disappeared.

The Italian news agency ANSA reported that the Egyptians presented “the ample, complete and in-depth report on an examination of cellphone traffic covering the areas of [Regeni’s] disappearance [on 25 January] and the discovery of his body” at this latest meeting. Egypt previously termed the request for such records “unconstitutional”.

The case led to fraught relations between the two nations, with Italy recalling its ambassador to Egypt in April.

{Judge lifts police ban, days after president accused courts of recklessness for allowing rallies that turned violent.}

Zimbabwe’s High Court has overturned a two-week ban on protests in the capital following a legal challenge from political activists.

Police banned rallies in Harare and the surrounding district on Thursday, after several violent clashes between police and anti-government protesters in recent weeks.

But Judge Priscilla Chigumba said on Wednesday that the official police note issued last week was “invalid” and curtailed citizens’ rights.

“The court has said the ban was unlawful,” lawyer Tendai Bit, a former finance minister who represented the activists, told journalists following the verdict.

Biti also said that the court had delivered “a brave judgement that asserts the independence” of the judiciary.

Zimbabwe has seen months of protests against alleged human rights abuses and the deterioration of the economy under President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the country since 1980.

Al Jazeera’s Haru Mutasa, reporting from the High Court in Harare, said some protesters were planning to go back to the streets as soon as this week.

“Their message is that they are unhappy with President Robert Mugabe; they say the economy is being run down, and some even say it’s time for him to go.”

Earlier this week, Mugabe accused the country’s judiciary courts of being reckless in allowing several anti-government protests that later turned violent.

“We can’t allow that to continue, (to have) these violent demonstrations unimpeded. No. Enough is enough,” Mugabe said.

On Friday, a different court denied bail to 58 people arrested during protests on August 26 when riot police fired tear gas, beat up several people and blocked off the site of an opposition demonstration in Harare.

In the same demonstration, protesters threw stones at police while some set tyres ablaze and pulled down the sign for a street named after Mugabe.