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Susannah Sirkin
ssirkin@phrusa.org

Susannah Sirkin is the Deputy Director of Physicians for Human Rights, a position she has held since 1987. She also directs PHR’s program on human rights violations in armed conflicts. Since 1998, Sirkin has overseen PHR’s research and advocacy on human rights violations in Afghanistan, including the investigations and advocacy regarding the Dasht-e-Leili massacre in northern Afghanistan since the discovery of the mass grave site by Physicians for Human Rights in 2001. Over the years, she has briefed senior officials at the UN, US Special Forces and the Afghan Government, as well as leading academics and NGOs on the Dasht-e-Leili grave.

In her time at PHR, Sirkin has organized health and human rights investigations to dozens of countries, including recent documentation of genocide and systematic rape in Sudan, PHR’s exhumations of mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for the International Criminal Tribunals, and investigations into the consequences of human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kosovo, Kuwait, Somalia, Turkey, Zimbabwe and the US.
Sirkin is the author and editor of numerous articles and reports on the medical consequences of human rights violations, physical evidence of human rights abuses, and physician complicity in violations. A leader in the US human rights movement for three decades, Sirkin has been quoted in articles and columns in recent months in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Associated Press and Boston Globe and has been interviewed live during the past month on ABC Radio News, Voice of America, New England Cable News, and Radio Australia.

 

Contributions

What’s happening in the Afghan massacre probe?
ASK THIS | August 11, 2009
In 2001, possibly as many as 2,000 Taliban and other captured fighters were suffocated in container trucks and then buried in a mass grave. Investigations were said to be thwarted during the Bush presidency. President Obama has ordered fact-finding. So what’s the status, and what has been found out thus far?


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