Africa is responding to an active Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — in a global health landscape that has shifted sharply beneath it. Financing is being reconfigured, donor commitments have contracted, and the surveillance, treatment and workforce arrangements Africa has relied on for two decades can no longer be assumed. This […]

South Africa is unique among the many countries impacted by the Trump administration’s actions, having experienced triple blows of cuts to HIV funding, research, and cooperative diplomatic relations.

PHR is documenting the harms of aid cuts and defending the right to health for all.

For such a small piece of tissue, the hymen has gained outsized status as the arbiter of virginity. But can it really do that?

“And this is precisely why so many sexual abuse survivors remain silent,” we thought, as we watched the Senate Judiciary Committee tear into Dr. Christine Blasey Ford as she tried to explain why some details of the sexual assault she suffered were fuzzy while others were vividly etched into her brain. As the hearings following […]

Every year, tens of thousands of women, men, and children suffer sexual violence during and after armed conflict.  PHR forges critical partnerships that are dramatically increasing local capacity to forensically document and prosecute cases of sexual violence. Our work is driven by PHR’s decades of experience in forensic investigations and advocacy. With pioneering technology like our award-winning […]

This post also appeared on OpenGlobalRights. En Español En Français In January 2011, a taxi driver in a remote town in Kenya raped a 28-year-old hotel receptionist on her way to work. She immediately went to the hospital and reported the crime to the police. The taxi driver was initially convicted of rape, but three […]

Russia’s recent announcement of its intention to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) follows similar threats of withdrawal from three African states: Burundi, Gambia, and South Africa. Kenya, the Philippines, and Uganda have also threatened to follow suit. These developments have triggered an outpouring of serious concern by human rights advocates. At last months’ […]

This blog post is part of PHR’s Tech & Human Rights Blog Series. The series is meant to highlight the intersection between technology and human rights, and examine the increasing role that technology can play in advancing human rights around the world. On December 30, 2007, when Mwai Kibaki announced his reelection as president of […]

This post originally appeared on Women Under Siege. A study by Physicians for Human Rights published today in the peer-reviewed online publication PLOS One has found that the pattern of sexual assault perpetrated during the period following the contested 2007 presidential elections in Kenya is consistent with the patterns of mass rape documented in conflict […]

PHR’s Program on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones is a multi-year training and advocacy initiative that aims to forge coalitions among regional medical, law enforcement, and legal experts. PHR’s goal is to dramatically increase local capacity for the collection of court-admissible evidence of sexual violence to support the future prosecution of these crimes. This video […]

PHR’s Program on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones brings together doctors, nurses, social workers, police officers, lawyers, magistrates, and judges with the goal of helping stakeholders to collect, document, and preserve evidence of sexual violence in order to help improve local prosecutions. This video provides a short preview of our program in the Democratic Republic […]

PHR’s team just returned from a training session in the DRC, where they are working with international and local partners to hold perpetrators accountable for using rape as a weapon of war. This is the first in a series. Learn more about the project. This past October, PHR’s Deputy Director Susannah Sirkin and I had […]