One year after a bloodless coup toppled Thailand’s government and the military took control, protestors staged a rally and demanded freedom. The government responded with violence. PHR’s investigation revels the truth behind allegations of excessive force and violations of medical neutrality.
Learn more about protecting health professionals during goverment strife and war.
PHR’s work in Haiti began after the coup in 1991, when it was discovered that Haitian security forces had committed widespread human rights abuses, including mass arrests and shootings of civilians. PHR’s investigation of Haitian prisons revealed unsanitary, overcrowded conditions, disease, and brutal beatings of prisoners. These findings are discussed in the report “Health Conditions in Haiti’s Prisons”.
Download the full report here.
The war in Somalia in the 1990s resulted in catastrophic famine, failed government, and a devastating legacy of landmines left from the civil war in the North. These added significantly to the economic devastation there, and were a principal obstacle in the way of repatriation of hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled to Ethiopia from northern Somalia during the civil war.
In December 1991, Middle East Watch and Physicians for Human Rights sent a delegation to northern Iraq to observe and assist in the exhumation, identification, and determination of probable cause and manner of death of individuals interred in mass and single, unmarked graves.
Between December 23 and December 29, our delgation travelled from Zakho, the northernmost town in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, to cities of Erbil and Sulaymaniyah in the south. In each of these cities, we interviewed relatives of the disappeared, former political prisoners, and Kurdish investigators and political leaders. We took testimony from grave diggers who, years earlier, had been ordered by Iraqi officers to secretly bury the bodies of executed political prisoners. We also interviewed a 15-year-old boy whose testimony may hold the key to one of the greatest mysteris in Iraqi Kurdistan: what happened to at least 100,000 men, women, and children who the Kurds say have disappeared without trace?
In December 1989, the United States invaded Panama and ousted General Manuel Noriega. The invasion was praised for its efficiency and for the low death tolls on both sides, including civilians.
Arriving just two weeks after the end of the invasion, a team of PHR experts traveled to Panama to document and report on the physical and psychological tolls of the invasion on non-military civilians. Gathering source materials and testimonies from other NGOs, medical staff, ordinary Panamanian citizens, and U.S. military and civilian authorities, PHR debunked the civilian death tolls provided by both the U.S. and Panamanian governments.
Since the military overthrow of the democratic Guatemalan government in 1954, soldiers and policemen have tortured and murdered with abandon while tens of thousands of extrajudicial executions and disappearances have never been investigated. Guatemala: Getting Away With Murder details two forensic missions which examined the flawed medical and scientific procedures applied in the few death investigations that were conducted in Guatemala.
This 1991 PHR report reveals that forensic pathologists at Sao Paulo’s Medicolegal Institute failed to report torture and murder by Brazil’s security forces. The report was researched and written by a PHR consultant Eric Stover in collaboration with forensic anthropologists and other experts including Clyde Snow, Luis Fondebrider, Alejandro Inchaurregui, and Fred Jordan, at the request of local human rights groups. The report also offered Brazil suggestions to improve its forensic capacities and to safeguard against the kinds of human rights abuses that took place under the military dictatorship.
PHR partnered with Physicians for Human Rights-Denmark to investigate the medical consequences of the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. Among the abuses investigated were the stationing of military personnel in and around hospitals, interference with the delivery of health care services, assaults on health professionals, and teh removal of medicines, equipment, and supplies from hospitals and health centers.
In 1991, hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in Kuwait faced a grave medical crisis due to the flight of most physicians and skilled medical workers, the closure of many hospitals, and the systematic removal of medical equipment and supplies by Iraq. PHR detailed the attack on and dismemberment of the Kuwaiti medical system since the invasion.
This report for the first time called for a comprehensive ban on landmines, an indiscriminate and deadly weapon. The report helped galvanize international attention to the devastating effects of antipersonnel landmines on civilians, particularly children.