News

The Government of Norway, the Government of Switzerland, and the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition invite you to a side event at the 24th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva: Attacks on Health Systems: The Need for Action by the Human Rights Council Friday, 20 September 11h00 - 13h00, Palais des Nations Room XII

The August issue of The Nation’s Health, the official newspaper of the American Public Health Association (APHA), features a front-page article on violence against health workers. “Work to Document Violence against Health Workers Growing” includes remarks from Leonard Rubenstein, chair of the Safeguarding Health in Conflict coalition.

In her address to the 66th World Health Assembly in Geneva on May 20, WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan spoke about the “deeply troubled times” we live in and referenced “assaults on health personnel and health care facilities in conflict situations,” which the World Health Organization condemns “in the strongest possible terms.”

On May 15 the Safeguarding Health in Conflict coalition sent a letter to World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan urging her to include in her World Health Assembly opening address a forceful statement condemning attacks on doctors, nurses, emergency medical personnel, and other health workers, particularly in Syria, which are taking place at an unprecedented level. The letter, which also has the support of the World Medical Association, called attention to a new study by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Violent Incidents Affecting Health Care, which reported that at least 921 violent incidents against health care personnel, infrastructure, and wounded or sick people took place in 2012.

On April 24 Foreign Affairs published an article by Leonard S. Rubenstein, “Unhealthy Practice: Medical Work in Conflict Zones Is Compromised.” For the second time in less than six months, Rubenstein writes, polio vaccine workers in Pakistan have come under fire. For the gunmen, killing health workers has been seen as a legitimate response to a nefarious extension of Western power. For the CIA, faux vaccine campaigns have sometimes been justified as part of the war on terror. Both sides are wrong, he says: denying or providing health care should never be an instrument of statecraft.