Blog

President Trump’s policy agenda compounds suffering, threatens public health, and violates fundamental human rights.  

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a groundbreaking United Nations process initiated in 2006 that evaluates the human rights records of all 193 Member States on an equal footing. This year, the human rights record of the United States will be the subject of scrutiny. To help inform the UPR of the United States in […]

The woman seated facing me smiled briefly as she recalled her work in Afghanistan with a nongovernmental organization that supported women’s voting rights. This was before the Taliban takeover in 2021 – before her organization’s offices were ransacked and directors imprisoned, before her town’s mayor warned that she was on a list of women wanted […]

I will never forget when violence broke out during Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014. On a very cold winter day in Kyiv, confrontation between police and protesters escalated. I watched a bus burn in front of me on a central street. Even then, it seemed to me like an omen. Those of us who […]

The United Nations reports that more than one in three women have experienced physical or sexual violence at some point in their lives. Research shows that these traumatic experiences have both short- and long-term effects on a survivor’s health, making them more likely to seek help from a health care provider. This impact goes beyond […]

PHR fights for justice for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence and empowers the clinicians that support them.

Recognizing the health harms caused by equipment capable of inflicting torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, PHR has joined organizations around the globe to call for a comprehensive treaty to end the trade of these weapons. 

One year after the international community shut down a United Nations monitoring mechanism, health workers in Ethiopia say the crisis in their country is far from over.

Child-rights experts from Physicians for Human Rights are collaborating with clinicians at HEAL Africa to care for thousands of people displaced by conflict in North Kivu, including children who suffered sexual violence. 

“Imagine providing critical care to patients with no access to medications or equipment, while your salary is withheld, your basic needs are unmet, and the very place you call home is no longer safe. Hospitals are routinely attacked by combatants. Insidious acts of sexual violence persist, and places of healing are turned into death traps. […]