A judge in Saudi Arabia reportedly approached several hospitals to find a doctor willing to surgically injure a man’s spinal cord in order to punish him for paralyzing another man.

Two years ago, 22-year-old Abdul-Aziz al-Mutairi was paralyzed and lost a foot after being attacked with a cleaver. His assailant has spent seven months in prison for the crime. Now al-Mutairi is invoking the Sharia principle of qias, or equivalence, which means a perpetrator must suffer the same wounds inflicted on the victim&mdash the proverbial “eye for an eye”.

Amnesty International and other human rights groups say the punishment would qualify as torture.

“We have a firm belief that this part of physicians should not participate in any inhumane treatment, even as a part of legal punishment in their country,” said Otmar Kloiber, secretary general of the World Medical Association, an international physicians’ organization which supports the right of Saudi doctors to refuse to perform the operation.

Saudi officials have swiftly entered damage control mode, reportedly urging al-Mutairi to accept blood money in lieu of the operation.

In the US, where capital punishment is still legal, doctors can be caught in a conflict between their pledge to “do no harm” and the American justice system. While the American Medical Association’s guidelines state that a physician “should not” participate in the administration of a lethal injection, thus far not a single doctor has been disciplined by a US medical board for doing so. But in May of this year, the American Board of Anesthesiology announced that it would revoke the certification of any member of its organization that participated in lethal injection.