How Can Humanitarian Organizations Offer Aid in a World in Which Doctors Are Attacked?

Medical personnel across the world are at risk of attack in armed conflicts. Attacks like the 2015 U.S. bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, or the Syrian government’s yearslong assault on doctors and medical facilities violate protections under international human rights law and endanger medical neutrality.

When combatants destroy a hospital, they strip people of a safe space to go to when they are wounded or ill. When they kill a doctor, they also jeopardize the lives that doctor may have saved.

At a recent event co-presented with Physicians for Human Rights, experts explored how violations of medical neutrality are increasingly being used as a weapon of war and what this means for humanitarian organizations’ ability to offer aid amidst conflict.

Listen above.