Wednesday 13 July, Manama, Bahrain

It is always good to be back in Bahrain and meet with good friends and fantastic human rights defenders including Nabeel Rajab, Mohammed Al-Maskati and Abdullah Alderazi. We also meet with the distinguished editor and journalist Mansoor Al-Jamri.

We have a very impressive delegation led by Professor Damian McCormack who has done so much to galvanise the Irish and international medical community on the imprisoned medical personnel. The former Minister of Foreign Affairs David Andrews makes a big impression and draws on huge experience. Senator Averil Power who has been raising the plight of the doctors in the Irish Parliament arrived with a letter of support from Tanaiste and Minister of Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore. The quiet wisdom and dignity of Professor Eoin O'Brien, who will write an article in The Lancet on our visit, is a huge asset. And the tireless energy and goodwill of our own Khalid Ibrahim is invaluable.

Our main purpose was to meet with the families of the detained doctors and some of the recently released medical personnel and it was hugely emotional to be welcomed so warmly be these courageous and dedicated people. We listened for three hours to many heartbreaking testimonies of torture and ill-treatment which deeply affected all of the delegation. Speaker after speaker emphasised not just the physical torture but the repeated attempts to humiliate the doctors and nurses.

Our words of support, which seemed to us almost inadequate in the face of such suffering, were clearly genuinely very welcome. It was very evident that the spirit remains strong amongst these heroic women and men. I tried to emphasise that the efforts of the torturers brought shame only on themselves and their superiors.

We later also heard further harrowing and heroic testimony from paramedics, medical students and ambulance drivers. The courage of the paramedics, doctors and ambulance drivers who defied repeated beatings to continue to try to reach those in desperate need of medical assistance deserves to be properly celebrated in the annals of international medical history. Instead they were detained and tortured for three months.