Susannah Sirkin

Past Recipients

2012

Susannah Sirkin is Deputy Director at Physicians for Human Rights, a position she has held since 1987 when she joined PHR shortly after its founding. She has helped lead PHR's campaigns against Persecution of Health Workers, including the current efforts to free the Alaei brothers, two Iranian doctors with expertise in HIV/AIDS treatment who are imprisoned in Tehran on false charges. Susannah has organized health and human rights investigations to dozens of countries, including recent documentation of genocide and systematic rape in Darfur, Sudan; PHR's exhumations of mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for the International Criminal Tribunals; investigations into consequences of human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kosovo, Kuwait, Somalia, Turkey and the US among others. She has worked on studies of sexual violence in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Thailand, and authored and edited numerous reports and articles on the medical consequences of human rights violations, physical evidence of human rights abuses, and physician complicity in violations.