Thousands of protesters in the small island Kingdom of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf took to the streets calling for government reform in early 2011. The government’s response was brutal and systematic: shoot civilian protesters, detain and torture them, and erase all evidence. On the frontline, treating hundreds of these wounded civilians, doctors had firsthand knowledge of these abuses and suffered from them themselves. Physicians for Human Rights and Médecins Sans Frontières each reported on these attacks against medical personnel, which were the result of their efforts to provide neutral care to wounded pro-democracy demonstrators⇑.

On 22 April a report by Physicians for Human Rights documented violations of well established principles of medical neutrality (box).1