Physicians for Human Rights

This case study - a joint product of eyeWitness to Atrocities (eyeWitness), Insecurity Insight, the Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR), and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) - expands on existing documentation of Russia’s widespread and systematic attacks on Ukraine’s health care system. It explores ways in which Russia has sought to systematically target health care as an apparent means of degrading resistance and, in Ukraine’s occupied territories, as a means of enforcing control over the civilian population, including by limiting and conditioning access to health care through a range of coercive practices. These practices include: (1) Russian forces misusing civilian health facilities for nonmedical purposes; (2) requiring forced changes of nationality as a precondition for gaining access to health care (otherwise known as “passportization”); and (3) threatening and harassing health care professionals as a way to further limit care and assert control over Ukraine’s health care system. Based on a joint dataset, the study details a range of reported incidents that collectively suggest an apparent pattern of illegal attacks on health by Russia that both limit and violate the right to health of Ukrainian civilians. These attacks are violations of both international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law. They also threaten the integrity of Ukraine’s health care system, which, while resilient, faces ongoing challenges following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

This report – a joint undertaking among eyeWitness to Atrocities (eyeWitness), Insecurity Insight, the Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR), Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), and the Ukrainian Healthcare Center (UHC) – documents the staggering toll that Russia’s aggression has had on Ukraine’s health care system since February 2022. Using 10 case studies and a joint dataset of attacks, this report shows how Russia appears to be violating international humanitarian law by deliberately and indiscriminately targeting Ukraine’s health care system as part of a broader attack on its civilian population and infrastructure. As the report details, the apparent targeting of the health care system is carried out through a variety of means, including: (1) attacks on health care facilities, (2) attacks on ambulances, (3) destruction of critical health infrastructure and theft of supplies, and (4) assaults, torture, and ill-treatment of health workers, including doctors, nurses, and paramedics.

Physicians for Human Rights denounces the sentencing today of Dr. Şebnem Korur Fincancı, a prominent human rights defender and the president of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, to two years and six months in prison for signing a peace petition in 2016 organized by a group of Turkish academics.

The abduction, arrest, and killing of thousands of health care workers, as well as the destruction of and damage to hospitals and clinics, have profound impacts on the health and well-being of populations for years and even decades to come.

As the Syrian and Russian governments planned to halt their bombing of civilians and hospitals in Aleppo, attacks on medical facilities in other parts of Syria continued unabated. Coalition member Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) documented a series of deadly strikes on hospitals throughout Syria and urged the international community to heed these ongoing violations of international law.