News

The APHA’s Governing Council adopted 14 new policy statements at its 2019 Annual Meeting in November. Ending Attacks on Health Workers calls on the World Health Organization, governments, the United Nations Security Council, and parties in conflicts to take specific actions to end attacks on health workers.

Physician for Human Right’s director of policy, Susannah Sirkin, addressed the UN Security Council on July 30, 2019, demanding that the Secretary-General launch an immediate investigation into recent attacks on health care in Idlib and northwestern Syria in violation of protection agreements. From March 2011 through July 2019, PHR corroborated 578 attacks on at least 350 separate facilities and documented the killing of 890 medical personnel.

The Executive Summary of our new report "Impunity Remains: Attacks on Health Care in 23 Countries in Conflict in 2018" is now available in Arabic.

Three and a half years of conflict in Yemen have led to the near total collapse of the country’s health system. More than half of health facilities are no longer functional and 16.4 million people do not have access to adequate health services. This advocacy brief by the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition highlights how attacks on health workers, facilities, and infrastructure—at least 40 this year—have contributed to the cholera outbreak and famine-like conditions and provides recommendations for the parties to conflict, the UN Security Council, and others to avert humanitarian and health catastrophe.

Denouncing attacks on health-care facilities and personnel in conflict situations, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 2286 in May, 2016. Addressing the Council, then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, condemned military actions leading to destruction of health-care facilities as war crimes, and called on Member States to honour their obligations to protect health-care workers and patients in conflict saying “even war has rules”.