Human
rights organization operated by physician activists and supported by
the Open Society Institute, the Tides Foundation, the Ford
Foundation, and the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Critical
of U.S. impact on human rights in countries affected by Cold War
conflicts
Has
accused the Bush administration of torture, mass killing, and
experimentation on detainees
Headquartered
in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- with an office also in Washington, DC --
Physicians
for Human Rights
(PHR) is a nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to “mobiliz[ing]
heath professionals to advance health, dignity and justice” by
investigating alleged human-rights abuses around the world and pursuing their
resolution. To validate reports of such abuses, PHR stages “fact-finding missions” in which forensic
and medical investigations are performed. The data yielded by these probes can be used in national or international
courts as evidence of war crimes or crimes against humanity, and may
also be used outside judicial systems as leverage for applying pressure on political
entities.
PHR
began
in the early 1980s when Jonathan Fine, a Boston physician and
activist, invited several other doctors with a record of human-rights
activism to join his nascent group, the American Committee for Human
Rights. The invitees included Jane Green Schaller, Carola Eisenberg, Jack Geiger, Robert Lawrence,
and John Constable. The group changed its name to Physicians for
Human Rights in 1986. Prior to his work with PHR, Dr. Fine had worked extensively
with Physicians
for Social Responsibility,
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and the
Medical Action Group.
Fine and his fellow PHR co-founders alleged that
U.S. support for various anti-Communist movements during the final
decade of the Cold War was facilitating the commission of many human-rights
abuses. Thus, the organization's activism tended to focus on incidents
associated with American intervention while disregarding the atrocities of
Communist, socialist, terrorist, or other forces that opposed U.S. foreign policy. For instance, in one of its earliest
investigations, PHR charged
the U.S.-supported anti-Communist government of El Salvador with
gross human-rights violations during that country’s civil war, yet
documented very little of the brutality
perpetrated by leftist rebel forces in their prosecution of that same war. Similarly, PHR investigated U.S. ally
South Korea's use of tear gas against internal demonstrators in the early 1980s, but did not devote similar scrutiny to the Communist regime in
North Korea.
In
1997, PHR was a co-recipient --
along with Jody Williams, Handicap International, Human
Rights Watch,
Medico International, Mines Advisory Group, and Vietnam Veterans of
America Foundation -- of a controversial Nobel
Peace Prize
for its campaign against landmines
in places such as Cambodia and Somalia. Notably, PHR neither spoke out against nor investigated the impact of Communist forces in
those regions, such as the Khmer Rouge and the Siad Barre
dictatorship. Since the 1990s, this selectivity by PHR has abated somewhat,
although the organization continues to focus its investigations disproportionately on areas with a
history of significant U.S. involvement (e.g., Iraq, Bosnia, and the
former Yugoslavia).
PHR has accused the
United States of human-rights violations of many types. Among the leading objects of the organization's condemnation are the allegedly poor conditions in American prisons and immigration-detention centers. PHR also objects to physician participation in
capital-punishment executions in the U.S. In 2002, the organization investigated a mass grave site in
Dasht-e-Leili, Afghanistan and accused
the Bush administration not only of being responsible for the deaths of those who were buried there,
but also of thwarting an open investigation into U.S. culpability.
In addition, PHR accused the
Bush administration of having tortured
detainees in a variety of ways.
Among PHR's major initiatives today are the following:
The Global Health Action Campaign
(GHAC) "aims to establish the right to health" vis a vis such issues as HIV/AIDS, women's health, and harm reduction.
Directing its resources chiefly to "poor and marginalized populations,"
this initiative seeks to eliminate the "tremendous inequity in health"
that "exists not only between developed and developing countries but
within these settings – between rich and poor, men and women, urban and
rural populations, and so on."
The Darfur Survival Campaign
"mobilizes health professionals, students, and members of the general
public to press for urgently needed security in Darfur," the Sudanese
region where hundreds of thousands of people have died in the ongoing
genocide.
The Campaign Against Torture
(CAT) by U.S. personnel "began with an immediate response to the first
allegations of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq and at Guantánamo
Bay." According to PHR, "it became clear that the government had
authorized and implemented a widespread regime of psychologically
abusive interrogation methods that could only be characterized as
torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment." The CAT works "to
reverse administration policy and legal opinions that support the use of
physical and psychological torture by the CIA."
In addition, PHR laments the "racial and ethnic stereotyping
and bias in medical care" that occurs in the United States "across the
full spectrum of disease categories and medical and surgical
procedures." "The pervasive if sometimes unconscious discrimination,"
adds PHR, "is part of a health care system that leaves 40 million
Americans without health insurance, and guarantees that U.S. minorities
live sicker and die younger than whites." By PHR's reckoning, "discrimination endangers not
only patients, but also the egalitarian commitments and ethics of
medicine ..."
Notable
figures associated with PHR include Richard
Goldstone,
who currently sits on the organization's board of directors. A former PHR board
member was Dr. Regina
Benjamin,
whom President Barack Obama appointed as U.S. Surgeon General in
2009.
