Executive summary Public protests have surged across the world in recent years, often led by grassroots movements seeking to challenge social and economic injustices, express discontent and demand transformative change from their governments. Economic inequity led to the 2018 “Yellow Vests” protests in France, and echoes of these protests were felt in the 2019 Chile protests, the […]

After George Floyd’s killing, captured on video and shown widely across the United States and around the world, millions of people took to the streets nationwide to support the Black Lives Matter movement and demand police accountability. While protests in the United States in June and July of 2020 were overwhelmingly peaceful and without incident, […]

I spend a lot of my time talking with other doctors. Most of the conversations are in the Oakland, California emergency room where I work – asking a colleague their opinion, consulting a specialist, or admitting a patient to the wards. In the past several years, as a volunteer for Physicians for Human Rights, I’ve […]

Since Sudanese protesters took to the streets in December 2018 to demonstrate against government corruption, economic mismanagement, and brutal repression, forces loyal to the government of President Omar al-Bashir have carried out massive violations of human rights.

For decades, the use of tear gas for crowd control has been fiercely debated. Over the past month, we’ve seen the conversation renewed, with unabated “yellow vest” protests in Paris, which have turned violent in a cloud of tear gas, and in the United States, where Customs and Border Protection fired smoke canisters at a […]

Executive Summary On August 27, 2017, Myanmar security forces and Rakhine Buddhist civilians attacked the village of Chut Pyin in northern Rakhine state, massacring its Rohingya Muslim residents and burning their homes to the ground. The attackers perpetrated a vast array of human rights violations on the Rohingya villagers, including killings, disappearances, beatings, stabbings, rape, […]

Children with gunshot wounds, severe burns, traumatic injuries – these are just some of the atrocities PHR’s team of doctors documented on their recent trip to Bangladesh, where nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled to escape a campaign of brutal violence by the Myanmar military. “The thing that really strikes me is that … we’re seeing […]

Read fact sheets about acoustic weapons, directed energy devices, rubber bullets (and other kinetic impact projectiles), stun grenades (and other disorientation devices), tear gas (and other chemical irritants), and water cannons. In recent years, there has been a rise in the number of popular protests in which people have taken to the streets to express […]