The Bureau of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council...

The Bureau of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) decided that the PACE Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee would draw up a special report on the case of five Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death in Libya on AIDS infection charges. The decision was made on a proposal by Bulgarian PACE Member Evgeni Kirilov, member of the Bureau and Chairman of the Economic Affairs Committee. The report would be based on a resolution which Kirilov had laid before the PACE and which had been signed by the leaders of all PACE groups. Five Bulgarian nurses had been sentenced to death by the Criminal Court in Benghazi, Libya, in May 2004 on charges of deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with AIDS. The verdicts were based on confessions which, according to the defence, had been extracted under duress. The verdicts had been appealed, and a ruling on the appeal was still pending.