Lethal in Disguise

October 29, 2020 11:34 AM

As a member of Physicians for Human Rights, Rohini Haar (MD, MPH) has used her medical background to document human rights abuses among the Rohingya in Myanmar and to bring attention to health consequences of crowd-control weapons abroad. She is now leveraging social media to document the use of kinetic impact projectiles (“rubber bullets”) in Black Lives Matter protests in the US. Warning: violent imagery

Haars' larger project, with the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, is to develop a protocol to standardize open source investigations to document international crime and human rights abuses around the world for use in legal investigations. For the recent study on KIPs in BLM protests the goal is not to demonstrate prevalence but to document & assess social media reports, matched with local statues and law enforcement protocols, to qualitatively assess use of force procedures within the the US.

Amnesty International: USA: The World is Watching

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posted by rubatan (2 comments total)

this is an insanely well put-together website. It lays everything out to plainly and frankly. This is why I am studying public health. This is what is driving me to be a public servant. None of these kinds of applications of the profession have been even hinted at in my studies. Its so disheartening. I'm taking an ethics course right now and I am so unbelievably bored and disappointed. The quality and importance of Dr. Haar's work has blown me away. I'm speechless. Excellent post, could not have come to me at a better point. Thank you.
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:51 AM on October 29, 2020 [4 favorites]

Haar is doing good work, and having a protocol for using open source investigations to document human rights abuses in legal investigation is something with tremendous potential. Thanks for this post.
posted by Lonnrot at 2:06 PM on October 29, 2020