Swedish Doctors for Human Rights

Organization

Swedish Doctors for Human Rights is a Sweden-based non-profit research Non-governmental organization composed by professors, physicians, researchers and academics within health-related disciplines, known by discoveries on the psychiatric effects of torture on prisoners, and epidemiological comorbidity issues associated with posttraumatic stress disorder and witnessing of war atrocities. Many of their research findings have been published and/or commented in peer-reviewed international medical journals and in Läkartidningen (the Journal of the Swedish Medical Association). In a review article at Clinical Psychology Review, discoveries by the team led by Marcello Ferrada de Noli, SWEDHR’s founder, were recognized as innovative research with clinical applicability, and Physicians for Human Rights reproduced several findings by the same team – on the psychiatric effects of torture leading to suicidal behaviour– in the report Leave No Marks. The organization is also credited with reporting on the impact of war atrocities on the public health of targeted populations and on exposure of governments' human rights breaches including those of Sweden.

Further, as defined in the organization's Manifest, SWEDHR's aims include the defense of organizations or individuals subjected to prosecution or persecution by governments for exposing war crimes, human rights abuses, or serious infringements to the civil liberties of populations. For example, the SWEDHR's chairman, a qualified nominator for the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo, formally presented the candidacy of whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to the Nobel Peace Prize 2014. Later in 2014, three professors/doctors on the executive board of SWEDHR publicly demanded that the Swedish authorities provide a legal definition of the stalled prosecutor's case against Julian Assange, the founder of the organization WikiLeaks, preceded by an open letter to the Prosecutor General of Sweden. SWEDHR has also advocated against allegedly human-rights breaches on Swedish cardiologist-surgeon Fikru Maru, imprisoned during 23 months in Ethiopia before legal procedures were initiated. The Swedish medical journal Dagens Medicin referred an open plea on the case sent by the organization to the Ethiopian ambassador in Sweden, based on a correspondence on the same issue with the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. SWEDHR has also advocated for the human rights of Valentina Lisitsa, the Ukrainian-born pianist celebrity whose controversial statements denouncing war atrocities in the War in Donbass elicited her banning from performing at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. SWEDHR intervened again in a similar attempt of boycotting the performance of Lisitsa in Norrköping, Sweden, in October 2015, a campaign which the organization ascribed to the initiative from associates of the neo-Nazi formations that the pianist had exposed in her speeches. The organization SWEDHR has also denounced the aerial attacks against hospitals run by Médecins Sans Frontières in Afghanistan and Yemen. SWEDHR's statement on the Kunduz hospital attack was also published or referred at Swedish medical journals, and the case originated a current follow up campaign in a SWEDHR site. Swedish Doctors for Human Rights has also raised its concern about potential human rights catastrophes associated with the risk of nuclear conflicts.

Leading members at the organization's board have published a variety of articles or been interviewed in both Swedish and international media on human-rights or geopolitical issues within the sphere of SWEDHR's specific aims.

Debate and controversies

The organization's chairman and vice-chairman, professors Ferrada de Noli and Anders Romelsjö respectively, had a polemic on Twitter with the Swedish Foreign minister Carl Bildt in December 2013. This controversy became a topic in an examination paper on political communication at Stockholm University. It originated in a question from Ferrada de Noli on the alleged board-connections of Carl Bildt regarding the Security company Booz Allen Hamilton – a NASA contractor and previously an employer of Edward Snowden. Bildt refuted the allegations but engaged in a polemic with the professors, who also debated with him in their respective blogs.

Another controversy involved the role of the Swedish section of Amnesty International in the Julian Assange case. While Amnesty International, the mother organization, issued a statement asking the Swedish government for guarantees that Assange would not be extradited to the U.S., the Swedish section of Amnesty issued another opposed to the suggestion. Leif Elinder, a doctor who also has been affiliated to SWEDHR, presented a proposal at a national conference of the Swedish section of Amnesty in 2014 in Malmö insisting on the same guarantees, but the directive group proposed that delegates vote against it, which they did.

SWEDHR has also rebutted in Sweden's main newspaper Dagens Nyheter stances by the Swedish Minister of Defense Peter Hultqvist over the issue of Sweden's neutrality and non-alignment. The organization argued that instead the enhancing of the geopolitical neutrality of Sweden would benefit the international panorama of human rights through an active role of Sweden in the area, and by searching peace solutions as in the time of the late prime minister Olof Palme. Later, three members of the SWEDR board engaged in the same newspaper in a similar debate on the possible participation of Sweden in NATO with Professor Wilhelm Agrell, however putting forward positions not approved by the board of directors. This caused and internal debate in SWEDHR ending with the resignation of Leif Elinder as board member.