Last Thursday marked the end of General Gration’s first 12 months as US Special Envoy to Sudan — an event that closely followed the one year anniversary of the Government of Sudan’s expulsion of humanitarian organizations in March 2009.
In the course of the past 12 months, the humanitarian community and UN Country Team in Sudan have made significant efforts to rebuild programming disrupted by the expulsion of 13 international and 3 Sudanese NGOs — efforts that have been encouraged by the US Envoy’s office. Now one year on, however, the loss of specialized programming continues to challenge NGOs and UN agencies working on the ground.
We are just three weeks away from World Health Day (April 7) and the official launch of advocacy for the Global HEALTH Act of 2010. And we have now heard that Representative Barbara Lee will be introducing the bill in the coming days! Now more than ever we need you to be ready on April 7 to email or call your Congressperson urging him or her to co-sponsor this bill.
Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking — and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.
The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session — and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session — a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding — the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.
We are persecuted by the Burmese government, so we came here for peace, but now we are persecuted by the Bangladeshi government.
A 25-year-old female refugee from Arakan State, Burma, said this to me while I was investigating conditions at Kutupalong unofficial camp, Bangladesh three weeks ago.
Listen to the SBS radio podcast in which I describe the plight of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority population from Burma, who are now Stateless and Starving in Bangladesh.
PHR investigator Parveen Parmar, MD examines a 25-year-old refugee at Kutupalong unofficial camp. He suffers from chronic malnutrition and had not eaten any food for two days: “Now I am dying. No one brings food to this camp. What will my wife and child do when I die?” (Physicians for Human Rights)
As you read this blog post, a humanitarian crisis is unfolding. Tens of thousands of Burmese refugees are in danger of dying from starvation and disease in Bangladesh.
Women and children, driven from Burma and now forced into makeshift camps in Bangladesh, need your help.
Take Action Now: Tell the Bangladeshi Embassy in Washington DC to stop deporting the refugees back to Burma and to stop blocking food aid to this vulnerable population.
Almost 20% of the children surveyed showed signs of acute malnutrition. They need food immediately. The Bangladeshi government must provide aid to these refugees. Email the Embassy today.
We’re just a month away from World Health Day (April 7th) and the official launch of advocacy for the Global HEALTH Act of 2010. So far this month, through this blog you’ve learned about the Global HEALTH Act and gotten some great facts about the health workforce crisis (and how many people are waiting in line for an I-Pad — impressive!). Today’s post includes a few more resources that highlight the impact of Africa’s health workforce shortage. Check them out and share with colleagues.
PHR made the following video in collaboration with our Kenyan partner group, the Health Rights Advocacy Forum. In this 6-minute video, four health workers at Mbagathi Hospital talk about the challenges they face every day — and why they stay and practice medicine in their home country. This moving video can be shown on campus or at your workplace to stimulate discussion and urge people to take action.
Physicians for Human Rights has found that in recent months Bangladeshi authorities have waged an unprecedented campaign of arbitrary arrest, illegal expulsion and forced internment against Burmese refugees. Critical levels of acute malnutrition and a surging camp population without access to food aid will cause more deaths from starvation and disease if the humanitarian crisis is not addressed.
What do health and human rights advocates do when they come across egregious abuses by a government, like PHR did three weeks ago in Bangladesh?
Phase 1: Conduct in-depth interviews with survivors, corroborate their testimonies, and speak off-the-record with every humanitarian worker and government official on the ground.
Phase 2: Design an emergency household survey to measure malnutrition and food insecurity in the population.
Phase 3: Take photos. Lots of them. One out of 50 may be good enough for print. (And don’t forget to get informed consent!)
Phase 4: Analyze the qualitative and quantitative data to ensure a robust report, write like mad, and pitch it to the media. With a little luck, they may bite.
Post script: A BIG thanks to my colleague, Dr. Parveen Parmar, whose emergency-physician calm in the field made all the difference in completing this emergency assessment.
To promote and protect the Right to Health, a health system must be of good quality, equitable, integrated, responsive, effective, and accessible to all. The capacities of health systems can be measured in many ways. No matter how they are measured, the disparities between countries’ health systems are tremendous, and these differences are a matter of human rights. It’s evident that these disparities have a significant – and at times, astonishing – impact on health outcomes:
Approximate number of Washington, DC residents: 600,000
Fact: Washington, DC, with a population of fewer than 600,000, has about twice as many physicians as do the over 80 million residents of Ethiopia.
For almost a decade, PHR has been a world leader on building human resources for health. What does that mean? We advocate to governments and funders around the world to help increase the number of health workers in developing countries so they can help communities realize the right to health.
We have a MAJOR opportunity to advance health workforce capacity coming up in April. Congress will be introducing a new bill, the Global HEALTH Act, which would provide $2 billion dollars for developing countries to build their health workforce capacity.
The newly released report by the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR report) shows not only that John Yoo and Jay Bybee created disgracefully flawed legal analysis but also that they tried to justify that reasoning by using bad science. As PHR has previously reported, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) exploited certain health professionals’ opinions to establish the legal justifications for the “enhanced interrogation” program. The OPR report shows in greater detail just how sloppy and intellectually indefensible this process was.
The most egregious case is John Yoo’s OLC analysis of the legality of waterboarding. Yoo later admitted to OPR that he believed from the outset that waterboarding came close to the legal standard of torture. Rather than turning to the relevant case law (which includes convictions for waterboarding), Yoo relied on information provided by psychologists involved in the US military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, designed to instruct service personnel in physical and psychological torture resistance.
Action Agenda: Realizing Treatment and Support for Women and Girls in Darfur (393.0 KB)
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