The Kafkaesque experience of the Bulgarian medics in Libya continues.

The so-called supreme judicial council in Libya has commuted the medics’ death sentences to life imprisonment. It did so after political negotiations resulted in the families of the Libyan children infected with HIV ending up with cash in hand, reportedly $1 million a child, elsewhere reported as $1 million a family.

But for the medics, about whom it requires restating that they are not guilty, there is scant clarity about the future, apart from the apparent fact that they now will not be put in front of one of the Gaddaffi state’s firing squads.

While Bulgaria is invoking a 1980s inter-state agreement on convict exchanges, it is not known whether Libya will agree to transfer the medics to Bulgaria. Even if it does, it is not known whether Bulgaria will have any legal (as opposed to moral) entitlement to parole the medics or to administratively transform their sentences into a form of “house arrest”. Even before any transfer takes place, it is not clear how long the process of approving and effecting the journey home will take. It cannot be forgotten that more than two years after Zdravko Georgiev was acquitted, Libya has barred him from leaving that country. Further, it is unpalatable to think that a possible welcome home for the nurses would also mean seeing them sent on, under Bulgarian guard, to the women’s prison in Sliven.

It is public knowledge that the sentences were commuted because of the financial settlement made with the families of the children. It is not public knowledge whether other matters have been tabled or included as part of negotiations. For example, Libya’s debt in arrears to Bulgaria. Moreover, it is hardly beyond the beyond the bounds of imagination that the Gaddaffi regime may have tried to add into the mix the fate of the Libyan convicted (in a legitimate court of law, unlike the farcical proceedings in Benghazi and Tripoli) of the terrorist bombing of an airliner over Lockerbie. As a matter of note, on June 28 this year the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission reportedly found that there may have been a “miscarriage of justice” in the 2001 Lockerbie trial. This could open a gap for Gaddaffi and his henchmen to try to exploit, especially as the fate of the medics remains uncertain. There is little point now exploring questions of the relative moral equivalence and weight of the two cases, because Libya is a state that proceeds outside of accepted democratic norms of morality. On the contrary, its track record is of a series of gross abuses of human rights, of which the case of the Bulgarian medics is just one. It may well be added that the manipulation by the Libyan regime of the families of the HIV-positive children, who deserve every sympathy and support, is another. Human rights organisations that have monitored the Gaddaffi state over the years may add to the list of indictments against it.

The hope must be that the medics return home as soon as possible, and however it is accomplished, that they live as free people, even though they will never be free of their traumatic memories.

The next hope must be that one day Gaddaffi, the fantasist who deludes himself about his role as all kinds of leader, and those who have collaborated actively in the abuses by his regime, including those who have staged a macabre travesty of a judicial process, one day are ushered to seats in the dock at The Hague, to answer for all that they have done. It would be good for one day the phrase “the Libya trial” to take on a new meaning.