Human Rights Report Details Violence Against Health Care Workers in Bahrain

Abstract

WHEN ANTIGOVERNMENT PROtesters marched in February and March of this year on the streets of Manama, the capital of Bahrain, peacefully calling for political and economic reforms, a brutal response by the country’s security services followed. The majority of the injured and dead were brought to Salmaniya Hospital in Manama. Rather than being a safe haven for the wounded, however, this facility, the largest modern medical facility in the country, was declared by the government to be a stronghold of opposition protesters. Security forces occupied the building. According to human rights organizations such as Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), patients were beaten and abused. Physicians, nurses, and other health care workers who treated the civilian protesters were systematically abducted, detained, and interrogated, and many now are facing trial for allegedly using the hospital as a base to try to overthrow the royal government. Several human rights organizations such as PHR and Doctors Without Borders have reported abuses against patients and health care workers. Richard Sollom, MA, MPH, deputy director at PHR and forensic pathologist Nizam Peerwain, MD, chief medical examiner, Tarrant County, Texas, carried out medical evaluations of torture survivors and spoke with people who witnessed physician abductions. They described their findings in a report released by PHR in April, Do No Harm: A Call for Bahrain to End Systematic Attacks on Doctors and Patients (https://s3.amazonaws.com/PHR _Reports/bahrain-22April_4-45pm .pdf). The report also documents the use of medical transport for military purposes, the destruction of medical facilities and medical records, and the obstruction of medical care and treatment. When reports about the injured protesters hit the international media, Sollom said, the Bahraini government put its own spin on the information, claiming that physicians were instigating political unrest, fomenting violence, turning the hospital into a political headquarters, and depriving thousands of people of treatment. Many of the physicians targeted are the country’s leading medical specialists, physicians with 20 to 30 years of experience and impeccable medical credentials, said Sollom. “It strains credulity to believe that these physicians would suddenly, out of the blue, start deliberately harming patients rather than helping them, as Bahrain’s government has alleged,” he said. At press time, dozens of physicians, nurses, and paramedics who were arrested for treating protesters were on trial before a military court. The government’s use of a military trial for these cases calls into question whether the rights of the accused can be adequately protected. Families of the defendants have reported to PHR and other human rights organizations that the defendants have been tortured and forced to sign false confessions in detention. Sollom noted that he and other human rights observers speculate that the Bahraini government has systematically targeted physicians and other health care professionals because these caregivers, who treated protesters taken to the hospital, have firsthand evidence of the excessive force used by the government security forces. “This is one of the most egregious sets of violations of medical neutrality and breaches of international law that I’ve seen personally and we as an organization have seen in decades,” said Sollom. Medical neutrality refers to the ethical duty of medi-