The High Court on Monday ruled that the denial of treatment by government and private hospitals or clinics resulting in the death of the patient would constitute a criminal offence.
The online Bench of Justice M Enayetur Rahim also issued 11 directives asking the government to bring to book the people responsible for death considering it as causing death by negligence. The court passed the rule after hearing five writ petitions filed as public interest litigations by several Supreme Court lawyers and right organisations for enforcement of government directives on treatment of all patients.
It is true that court directives came at a time when critical patients continued to die after being denied of treatment at different hospitals in the capital and elsewhere during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The petitioners stated that in hospitals doctors were declining to receive or attend critical patients without a certificate that the patient was not positive for Covid-19.
In the 11-point directives, the court asked the health secretary and the director general of the health services to strengthen monitoring to prevent private hospitals or clinics from imposing excessive bills for treating Covid-19 patients.
These directives are in the best interest of the patients but the most important question is why these human rights bodies do not do something on their own initiative and strength. They can organise themselves to put pressure on the government to do the right things desirable for the patients.
Running to courts with public interest cases when courts themselves are in a precarious situation and lawyers themselves are not to united to make the judiciary functionally strong and independent is not the correct thing to do.
As lawyers it is their responsibility not to put the judiciary in an embarrassing position. The court’s orders are to be implemented by the government. The government has already issued many such orders which have proven incapable of implementation.
The government is in a situation of awful mismanagement created by allowing free corruption and by placing the wrong people in high places for loyalty.
The health system is broken beyond repair. On the top of it corruption goes on unchecked. So who is going to help whom? There is no rule of law but rule of corruption.
For long the conscientious sections of our people tolerated the intolerable silently which has pushed the country to such a miserable position.
The government has created so much mismanagement that for everything it depends on the police and the police also took advantage of corruption as an opportunity.
The government only knows how to declare areas locked down and how to ask the police and army to enforce it. Even in rich countries lock downs are arranged by making food funds available for the people in need. Our government officials are so much out of touch of the people and so rich that many them do not understand that without a free food supply lockdown means that the poor people will starve.
It is not a secret that hospitals are unprepared in a pathetic way. ICU sections of many hospitals are not dependable. Three ICU specialists died of coronavirus. Many doctors and nurses are also losing their lives everyday because they are taking risks with their lives to save others. But they don’t have adequate equipment for their own protection so they can offer better treatment to the patients.
It is true that in some hospitals doctors take advantage of the helplessness of the patients and charge exorbitantly. The charge for ICUs which are non functional to deal with Covid-19. It is also reported that in hospitals the ICU patients are kept tied down to their beds to stay as long as the doctors want for higher bills to pay.
False corona free certificates are available for going abroad and in China and Japan such people with false certificates were caught. Nothing shames us.
We grant that no one singly is to be blamed. May be single one used. Many of us are guilty of committing crimes against the people. Now we are dying helplessly for the crimes of many.
Thanks to doctors and nurses in the front line of the pandemic who fight and who try to be helpful when the government is unprepared. At the same time we urge the doctors associations to see that the poor patients are humanely treated.
