Stop Torture in Health Care Trailer

When I go to a hospital or clinic, I expect to receive good quality, respectful care, and I usually do. Unfortunately, that is not the experience for many people around the world. For them, health care settings are not places of healing, but places where severe mental or physical suffering is inflicted as a result of government policy or negligence. This is especially true for patients from socially marginalized groups- people living with HIV, gays and lesbians, transgender persons, people who use drugs, and people with intellectual disabilities or mental health problems. Their contact with health facilities is too often characterized by physical abuse, insults, invasion of privacy, forced medical procedures, or denial of treatment. This amounts to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment- and in some cases, torture.

Such abuses must stop, and we all must do our part to make sure that they do. That is why a coalition of health and human rights organizations, including the Open Society Foundations, is launching the Campaign to Stop Torture in Health Care. We are committed to a world where health care centers are safe, and where our governments act to prevent all forms of torture.

Such egregious and pervasive cruelty is often condoned in the name of medicine, public health, or public order. For example, in the so-called "rehabilitation" centers throughout Southeast Asia, people who use drugs are locked away without any access to medical care or legal recourse. These centers are overseen by government authorities, with private business operating the forced labor facilities inside. The centers rely on physical abuse, shackles, solitary confinement, and other indignities to "treat" drug addiction and extract labor from the detainees. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people quickly return to drug use once they are released from these centers.

Across the globe, women continue to be forced or coerced by medical personnel to submit to permanent and irreversible sterilization procedures, sometimes even without their knowledge. Cases of forced and coerced sterilization have been reported in North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Women who are poor or stigmatized- Roma women, women living with HIV, indigenous women, women with physical or intellectual disabilities, women who use drugs- are most likely to be deemed "unworthy" of reproduction. Governments turn a blind eye to these practices in their own public hospitals. Perpetrators are seldom held accountable. Victims rarely obtain justice for this violent abuse of their rights.

Torture also happens when health care workers are prevented from helping patients because of ill-conceived government policies or regulations, or because of bureaucratic inertia. We recently met a young man named Vlad in the small town of Cherkasy, Ukraine (see his interview above). He was 18 when doctors discovered he had a brain tumor. He underwent several treatments in multiple hospitals but nothing could be done. Vlad’s condition deteriorated over the years: he became paralyzed, his kidneys began to fail, and he developed severe sepsis on both sides of his body from his bedsores.