Health and Human Rights News
Week ending 7 June 2025
Scientists sign up to fight censorship
Over 6000 scientists have signed an “Open letter in support of science” in protest against President Trump’s 23 May executive order which called for political appointees to “sit in judgment of science and scientists”. The letter calls for swift social and legal actions against the “illegal Executive Order that represents dangerous overreach into our scientific systems.” The executive order gives political appointees the authority to “correct scientific information,” control the way it is communicated to the public and the power to “discipline” anyone who violates the way the administration views science.
See also:
FIGHT FOR RIGHTS VIEWPOINT: Trump’s Banned Words and Disastrous Health Policies, Joseph J. Amon, 3 February 2025
Emergency abortion guidance rescinded
The Trump administration’s revocation of guidance for the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) will deny pregnant people access to emergency abortions in states that prohibit abortion. Previously EMTALA assured patients access to abortion in emergencies in all states. “This move by the Trump administration reflects its broader coordinated attack on reproductive health care specifically and on science broadly,” said Payal Shah, Director of Research, Legal, and Advocacy at Physicians for Human Rights, as hospitals in states with abortion bans are left in the lurch to determine whether or not they will be attacked if they provide evidence-based care in obstetric emergencies.
See also:
US Clinicians Face a Dual Loyalty Crisis over Reproductive Health Care, Ranit Mishori, Payal K. Shah, Karen Naimer, and Michele Heisler, 3 March 2024
FIGHT FOR RIGHTS VIEWPOINT: The US Administration Assault on Global Reproductive Health and Autonomy, Winona Xu, 13 February 2025
State bans on gender-affirming care are harmful
Sweeping state bans on gender-affirming care in the United States are endangering the health of transgender youth, destabilizing health care systems, and creating barriers to accessing care, according to a Human Rights Watch report. Over the last four years, 25 US states have eliminated evidence-based medical care, and Trump’s broad executive order in January has further endangered the rights of transgender individuals at the federal level. Yasemin Smallens, LGBT Rights Officer with HRW explains, “These laws are upending lives, driving young people into crisis, compelling families to uproot their lives, and fueling anti-trans hostility.”
US reconciliation bill threatens immigrant access to health care
The US House reconciliation bill on health care access for immigrants will penalize states that have opted to expand Medicaid and would likely lead to loss of health coverage for many immigrant groups. Leonardo Cuello and Kelly Whitener at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families write that these groups include immigrant children and pregnant women who are lawfully residing in the United States, those with humanitarian parole or temporary protected status, and other immigrants (both lawfully present and undocumented) covered by state-only programs. They describe the cuts as ‘incredibly harmful’.
Türk: Human rights and science needed in climate emergency
“Our rights call for all people, now and in the future, to live in safety, security and opportunity, on a healthy planet,” said High Commissioner Volker Türk in a speech at Oxford University this week. He said human health is inseparable from the health of the environment, and called for “a fact-based politics that takes science seriously, accepts the realities of climate-and environment-related harms, and deals with them effectively and urgently.”
See also:
Special Section: Ecological Justice and the Right to Health, December 2023, Vol 25/2
Gulf states must protect workers from extreme heat
Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Kuwait, must better protect migrant workers from extreme heat and design stronger regulations to protect them from such unsafe conditions, says Human Rights Watch. “The countries ignore the scientific evidence on the limitations of calendar-based midday work bans to shield workers from heat-related health risks,” said HRW, describing the threat posed by extreme heat conditions and weak labor protection in the region.
See also:
Crises as Catalyst: A New Social Contract Grounded in Worker Rights, Diane F. Frey, Gillian MacNaughton, Andjela H. Kaur, and Elena K. Taborda, Volume 23/2, December 2021
Calls to release humanitarian workers in northern Yemen
This week marked one year since dozens of personnel from the United Nations, nongovernmental and civil society organizations, and diplomatic missions were arbitrarily detained by the Houthi de facto authorities in northern Yemen. “Nothing can justify their ordeal. They were doing their jobs, helping people in desperate need: people without food, shelter, or adequate health care,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO, along with other UN agency directors and Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The UN and INGOs are working to secure the safe and immediate release of all those arbitrarily detained.
The world looks to Gaza
… UN Experts call for the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s safe passage
UN Experts, including Tlaleng Mofokeng, the Special Rapporteur on the right to health, called for the safe passage of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which is sailing to the Gaza Strip with essential medical aid, food, and baby supplies. They urged UN Member States to fulfil their legal obligations to ensure this critical humanitarian aid reached Gaza safely by sea, and that aid trucks at the Rafah crossing reached civilians safely by land. “Over six hundred days into Israel’s starvation campaign and genocidal violence against the Palestinian people in Gaza, the situation is at its most horrific”, the experts stated in a press release.
…High Commissioner decries attacks at aid sites
The UN OHCHR described the “deadly attacks on distraught civilians trying to access the paltry amounts of food aid in Gaza” as unconscionable. High Commissioner Volker Türk was critical of the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” which is organising the aid distribution site, where for three days running, people were killed. “Palestinians have been presented the grimmest of choices: die from starvation or risk being killed while trying to access the meagre food that is being made available through Israel’s militarized humanitarian assistance mechanism.” He called on Israel to comply with the International Court of Justice 2024 ruling to permit “unhindered provisions of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.”
…US vetoes UN resolution for ceasefire
The United States vetoed a draft UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, in an act that Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, called “shameful and inhumane.”
See also:
Palestine Health and Settler Colonialism: A Call to Action, Raquel Selcer and Sanjna L. Surya, 20 December 2023
Civilians and medical facilities targeted in Russian drone strikes
Russian forces have been deliberately attacking civilians and civilian objects using inexpensive, commercially available quadcopter drones, reports Human Rights Watch. “Russian-operated drones have targeted healthcare facilities and ambulances and their personnel, including rescue workers responding to drone attacks on civilians. Ambulance personnel said their teams could no longer respond to calls in some areas for fear of drone attacks.” Planned strikes in the Ukrainian port city of Kherson by these armed drones constitute war crimes and also amount to crimes against humanity, says HRW which documented at least 45 such illegal attacks between June and December 2024, and notes that they continue to this day.
See also:
Drone Attacks on Health in 2023: International Humanitarian Law and the Right to Health, VIEWPOINT Joseph J. Amon and Leonard Rubenstein, Vol 26/1, 2024
The Other Humanitarians: Emergency First Responders and the Problem of Eradication-Level Harm, VIEWPOINT Adriana Petryna, March 2025
Moment of hope in residents’ battle with petrochemical companies
A US Court of Appeals ruling to reverse a lower court’s dismissal of an environmental case has given hope to residents in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’. Residents are fighting to put an end to fossil fuel and chemical plant construction and expansion in their neighborhood. Human Rights Watch environment and human rights director Richard Pearshouse said the decision, “is one bright spot under a new national administration that has announced deregulation of the fossil fuel industry, gutted the EPA’s ability to address environmental harm disproportionately concentrated within Black, poor, and minority communities, and dropped its own air pollution case against two of Cancer Alley’s largest petrochemical operators.”
See also:
The Right to a Healthy Environment is a Powerful Sword for Climate Justice, Timothy Arvan, Dec 2021, 23/2
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