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. […]
June 18, 2024
Attacks on Health Care, Mass Atrocities, Persecution of Health Workers, Sexual Violence
During its 2014 offensive, ISIS waged horrific violence in Iraq. ISIS targeted religious minorities, including the Yazidis, who suffered brutal attacks on their communities. Thousands of Yazidi men, women, and children were killed, forced into flight, or abducted, raped, and enslaved. Today, ten years later, most survivors are still waiting for justice. Recognizing the […]
The 55th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva concluded last week. Headed by PHR’s Executive Director Sam Zarifi, JD, LLM, the PHR delegation included Christian De Vos, JD, PhD, director of research and investigations, and Uliana Poltavets, Ukraine emergency response coordinator. The team presented several interventions before the Council, partnered […]
April 16, 2024
Attacks on Health Care, Mass Atrocities, Sexual Violence
The conflict that started in Tigray, Ethiopia in 2020 continues to cause devastating harm to civilians and the health sector and has led to a large-scale humanitarian and human rights crisis that continues in Tigray and has spread to other regions of Ethiopia. PHR has worked with our medical, public health, and human rights partners […]
Alors que le conflit dans l’est de la République démocratique du Congo (RDC) continue de s’intensifier, le partenaire médical de Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), HEAL Africa, fournit des soins intensifs aux survivants des violences sexuelles et sexistes. Nous avons échangé avec HEAL Africa pour en savoir plus sur la fourniture des services des soins […]
February 14, 2024
Children's Rights, Mass Atrocities, Sexual Violence
As the conflict in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to escalate, PHR medical partner HEAL Africa is providing intensive care to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.
February 14, 2024
Children's Rights, Mass Atrocities, Sexual Violence
Campaign Zero (CZ) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) are partnering to raise awareness about the medically-baseless concept of “excited delirium,” which has been misused to explain deaths in police custody for decades, disproportionately those of Black men in the United States. This jointly-led initiative challenges the baseless concept often cited to justify excessive force […]
January 22 will mark the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which established federal protection of the right to abortion in the United States. Since June 2022, when the Supreme Court reversed Roe, at least 14 states have adopted abortion bans imposing severe civil and criminal penalties on clinicians for providing abortion except in very […]
As we mark International Human Rights Day and the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we spoke with PHR Executive Director Sam Zarifi. In this Q&A, he reflects on the state of the human rights movement today, and provides a look ahead to how PHR is preparing for the next era of […]
