HealthRight International
Human rights with a doctor’s touch
A U.S. organization catalogs abuses of asylum seekersIn February 1993, Douglas Shenson and a small convoy of American lawyers and physicians flew to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to examine more than 200 HIV-positive Haitian political refugees who were waging a desperate hunger strike to protest their containment at the U.S. military base there. Upon his return to New York, Shenson, an internist now at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut, testified before a U.S. district court that the camp’s overcrowded and unsanitary conditions were posing serious health risks to the detainees. Four months later, U.S. officials relocated the refugees to American soil.
Shenson quickly became known among the New York Haitian community as a doctor who was sympathetic to the plight of political refugees, and he started receiving phone calls from immigration lawyers asking him to conduct physical examinations for asylum seekers with claims of torture. Soon, it wasn’t just Haitians who were calling him, and he became inundated with requests from lawyers with clients from around the world who were also hoping to find a safe haven in the U.S.
“What became increasingly clear to me was there was no way I could do this all by myself,” says Shenson. “There was an absolute structural need for some organization to create a clinic that was specialized around these sets of issues and could respond to this significant need.”
A few months later, Shenson, together with HealthRight International (then known as Doctors of the World-USA), launched a health center, called the Human Rights Clinic (HRC), at a public hospital in the Bronx, New York, to document asylum seekers’ claims of torture-related trauma—the first such clinic in the city. Since then, the HRC has expanded to include doctors’ offices and detention centers around the country, and the program now sees more than 350 asylum applicants each year.
Besides a handful of full-time coordinators, the clinic is run almost entirely by volunteer physicians and mental health professionals who donate their time to document the physical or psychological abuses sustained by asylum seekers. Gary Stadtmauer, a New York–based allergist, is one of the clinic’s most active participants—in March, he wrote his one hundredth affidavit documenting torture for the organization.
Of those 100 evaluations, one in particular from the now-closed Wackenhut Detention Center in Queens, New York, still stands out in Stadtmauer’s memory. He met a man, he recalls, with a missing tooth that had been fractured and yanked out by his captors. This created a hollow passage between the roof of the man’s mouth and his sinus cavity. To show the extent of the injury, the man took a sip of water. As liquid poured out his nose, the man broke down and cried. “It was a tough moment,” Stadtmauer says.
Stadtmauer has seen the scars of many horrific wounds, ranging from acid burns to broken bones to whipping injuries. “Sometimes the scar speaks for itself,” says Stadtmauer, who reported his clinical findings in the January issue of the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine. “Sometimes it’s a small scar, but that small scar tells the story.”
Running the clinic can be “nerve-wracking at times,” admits HRC project manager Hari Acharya, a Bhutanese refugee who was granted asylum in 2000 after spending seven years in refugee camps in Nepal. But “you basically save lives just by doing what we do.”
In the U.S., less than 1% of applicants without an attorney are granted asylum, and only around 20% of petitioners who have legal counsel are successful. In contrast, the vast majority of applicants who team up with the HRC win their cases. Last year, for example, 165 of the 181 clients seen by HRC volunteers who reported their adjudication were granted asylum.
Mila Rosenthal, HealthRight’s executive director, is proud of the achievements of the HRC—the organization’s longest running program and the only effort currently in the U.S. “This is America at our best,” she says. “It certainly goes against a lot of terrible stereotypes people have about immigration.”
Photo: HealthRight International
