A British university has been found guilty by an internal committee of failing to take adequate provisions to protect the interests of subjects involved in a study of individuals who assist AIDS patients to commit suicide.

The complaint against the University of Exeter was lodged by a postgraduate researcher, Canadian criminologist Russel Ogden, who abandoned the study because he felt that the university was not prepared to take sufficiently rigorous steps to protect the identities of those involved in his research.

In particular, Ogden wanted to ensure that he would not be required to provide the names of those contacted during his research to the police at a later date. His concern was based on earlier experience: when conducting research for a masters thesis at Simon Fraser University in Canada in he early 1990's, Ogden had to fight off demands from a coroner's court to reveal the identity of individuals who he had interviewed on a confidential basis.

A board of inquiry set up to investigate Ogden's complaints at Exeter, headed by a deputy vice-chancellor at the university, rejected a number of lesser charges that Ogden had levelled against the university. For example, these related to disputes with the sociology department over the writing up of this thesis, and over what he described as a "suffocating silence" surrounding the issues that he was raising. But on the main charge—that of failing to make adequate provisions to ensure that the identity of informants be protected—the board of inquiry concluded that the ethical approval of Ogden's PhD research was "mishandled," and demonstrated "serious incompetence and subsequent misjudgement" by the department of sociology in which he was working.

The board also found that there was a "casual attitude" towards maintaining consistency in the actions of the department of its written records. And it described the university ethics committee of offering an "inert response" to a report by the sociology department on its ethical approval of Ogden's PhD thesis.

Ogden insists that the case has exposed major shortcomings in the approach of British universities to providing adequate protection for human subjects in potentially sensitive research. "In Britain...many researchers still seem to hold the view the their work is ethical by definition; there is this 'nanny mentality' that what we are doing is automatically good for the subject, so trust us."

A spokesman for the university says that a set of recommendations is being drawn in response to the criticisms made by the inquiry, and that these will be put to the University Senate shortly.