All kinds of people help make sure that everyone’s human rights are respected. Human rights defenders protect our freedom of expression, our access to health care and clean water, our ability to protest peacefully, and all of our other fundamental human rights. Human rights are increasingly under attack in the United States and around the world. That’s why human rights defenders are needed.
The mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders was established in 2000 by the Commission on Human Rights (E/CN.4/RES/2000/61). It was later on extended by the Human Rights Council in 2011 (A/HRC/RES/16/5), 2014 (A/HRC/RES/25/18), 2017 (A/HRC/RES/34/5) and most recently in March 2020 for another three years by the March 2020 HRC decision 43/115 and the June 2020 Human Rights Council resolution 43/16.
“Human rights defender” is a term used to describe people who, individually or with others, act to promote or protect human rights in a peaceful manner. Human rights defenders are identified above all by what they do and it is through a description of their actions (section A below) and of some of the contexts in which they work (section B below) that the term can best be explained. The examples given of the activities of human rights defenders are not an exhaustive list.
Asylum-seekers, refugees, internally displaced people, stateless people and others of concern to UNHCR have diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). They face a complex array of challenges and threats in their countries of origin, and asylum, including discrimination, prejudice, violence and difficulty accessing assistance. UNHCR and IOM have jointly developed this comprehensive training package on the protection of people with diverse SOGIESC for personnel as well as the broader humanitarian community.
“This guide – prepared by the APT with great attention to the current state of international human rights law, best practices in the field of torture prevention, and the wealth of experience of the extraordinary group of experts that provided its substance – will provide an understanding of the factors of risk and the acts, patterns and extreme manifestations of torture and ill treatment against LGTBI persons, and is an invaluable blueprint for any conceptual understanding of these.”
The role of effective communication and patient-centeredness in providing safe and high-quality health care to diverse patient populations is well accepted. Effective patient–provider communication has been linked to an increase in patient satisfaction, better adherence to treatment recommendations, and improved health outcomes. Patient-centered care “encompasses qualities of compassion, empathy, and responsiveness to the needs, values, and expressed preferences of the individual patient.”2 (p.48) Combining the elements of effective communication and patient-centeredness into care delivery has been shown to improve patients’ health and health care.
UNHCR issues these Guidelines pursuant to its mandate, as contained in the Statute of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in conjunction with Article 35 of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and Article II of its 1967 Protocol.
The purpose of this course is to expand health and mental health professionals’ abilities to identify and understand countertransference reactions common in work with trauma survivors, the causes and signs of burnout and compassion fatigue, and factors contributing to vicarious trauma and resilience.
The purpose of this qualitative, descriptive study was to explore clinicians’ experience of vicarious traumatization and/or vicarious resilience in working with refugee clients in order to gain a better understanding of vicarious trauma and the ways in which clinicians are effected by vicarious trauma. A second purpose of this study was to determine whether or not clinicians experience vicarious resilience in working with this client population, and what, if any, impact the vicarious resilience has on the clinician’s treatment modalities, practice style, and personal life.
An integrative training framework articulating multiple perspectives on the impact of trauma work is offered with a training/supervision exercise to address the complex and systemic relationships that affect therapists in both positive and negative manners. The concepts of vicarious trauma, vicarious resilience, compassion fatigue, resilience, posttraumatic growth, altruism born of suffering, and reciprocity are reviewed. The paper highlights the importance of vicarious resilience as a dimension of experience that counteracts the normally occurring fatiguing processes that trauma therapists experience.
This essay examines the phenomenon of vicarious trauma, its impact on those who work with traumatized clients and the importance of self-care.
The background material and statistics in a manual (55 p.) for the ProQOL test mentioned above.
This test provides with material to estimate the impact, the possible burnout or compassion fatigue in the helpers in disaster.
The Headington Institute provides also some other very good online training courses to download/do online.
This assessment tool provides an overview of effective strategies to maintain self-care. After completing the full assessment, choose one item from each area that you will actively work to improve. Another example of post month assessment sheet.
Each year more than 10 million children in the United States endure the trauma of abuse, violence, natural disasters, and other adverse events. These experiences can give rise to significant emotional and behavioural problems that can profoundly disrupt the children’s lives and bring them in contact with child-serving systems. For therapists, child welfare workers, case managers, and other helping professionals involved in the care of traumatized children and their families, the essential act of listening to trauma stories may take an emotional toll that compromises professional functioning and diminishes quality of life.
Vicarious trauma refers to the negative reactions that can occur when hearing about someone else’s traumatic experiences. Human rights defenders and officers are at risk of vicarious trauma when they interview victims of human rights violations and hear stories of their suffering.
A new “Caring for Volunteers, a Psychosocial Support Toolkit,” will help National Societies not only prepare volunteers but also support them during and after disasters, conflicts and other dramatic events. The toolkit contains practical tools for preparing for and handling crises, as well as for peer support and communication. In addition, there is a chapter on how to monitor and evaluate volunteers’ efforts. Some of the tools can be printed out for managers in the field and for volunteers.
This workbook (80 p) is together with the workbook mentioned above, to describe the SMID concept. Both workbooks were designed to provide the basic training material for persons who will provide help for the helpers.
Following the programme, staff reported significant reductions in role ambiguity, and improvements in the nature of their work, personal relationships with colleagues and superiors and physical conditions in the workplace. There were no significant differences in reported organisational structure or job satisfaction. This evaluation of a grassroots programme, designed to address the expressed needs of displaced staff, suggests that reductions in daily living stresses can be achieved even in the context of ongoing crisis.
This workbook (26 p) describes the SMID concept (Stress Management in Disasters in the Caribbean), a “comprehensive, peer-driven, multi-component stress management program which is administered on a volunteer basis and was designed to prevent and to mitigate the psychological dysfunction which exposure to traumatic situations like disasters may cause in emergency response personnel. The program is based on the principles of crisis intervention and critical incident stress management and it is not intended to take the place of professional therapy”.
These guidelines outline recommendations for the prevention of, and response to, vicarious trauma in researchers working in the field of sexual and intimate partner violence but can also be of use and relevance to those researching other sensitive topics including other forms of gender based violence.
The article provides with an overview over the problems and psychological consequences helpers are facing, by taking care of clients in very difficult and almost catastrophic situations, with focus on social workers in Child Welfare.
The results of this study imply that supervisors and agencies can impact the amount of self-care their staff participate in, potentially resulting in staff who have higher levels of compassion satisfaction and lower levels of burnout or secondary traumatic stress.
In this webcast Frank Ochberg explains the differences between Compassion Fatigue, Secondary PTSD, burn out, and Caregiver Burden. Our DVD, When Helping Hurts: Preventing & Treating Compassion Fatigue is available for purchase on www.giftfromwithin.org
This article examines the complex relationship between culture, values, and ethics in mental health care. Cultural competence is a practical, concrete demonstration of the ethical principles of respect for persons, beneficence (doing good), nonmaleficence (not doing harm), and justice (treating people fairly)—the cornerstones of modern ethical codes for the health professions. Five clinical cases are presented to illustrate the range of ethical issues faced by mental health clinicians working in a multicultural environment, including issues of therapeutic boundaries, diagnosis, treatment choice, confidentiality and informed consent, and the just distribution of limited health care resources.
This paper discusses the relevance of multiculturalism to professional excellence in counseling. Focus also on multicultural awareness, multicultural counselors.
Roughly 15 million of the 62 million rural U.S. residents struggle with mental illness and substance abuse. Important but little-recognized ethical dilemmas also affect rural mental health care delivery. The authors describe the features of rural mental health care and provide vignettes illustrating ethical issues encountered in the predominantly rural and frontier states of Alaska and New Mexico.
The American Psychological Association, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Fordham University Center for Ethics Education convened a group of national leaders in bioethics, multicultural research, and ethnic minority mental health to produce a living document to guide ethical decision making for mental health research involving ethnic minority children and youths. This report summarizes the key recommendations distilled from these discussions.
In response to the rapid global rise in trafficking and growing demand for information on trafficking by policymakers, donors, service providers, and the media, women who have been trafficked are increasingly being interviewed to discuss their experiences. This article is introduces recommendations that are intended primarily for use by researchers, members of the media, and service providers unfamiliar with the situation of trafficked women. They do not explicitly discuss the different risks and obligations of interviewing females who are minors, although many of the same principles will apply.
This paper reviews recent literature regarding ethical issues in research with children and young people. This is a topic that has seen a significant growth in interest over recent years, in response to developments in both child research and ethics. Whilst acknowledging the clear importance of the issues related to medical and psychological research studies on children, they are beyond the scope of this review which is focused on ethical issues related to research with children, who are actively participating and expressing their views and opinions.
After WWII, the United Nations formed as a result of the Holocaust. After such a horrific event, world leaders knew it was necessary to formally enshrine universal human rights. The UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. The 30 articles outline the basic rights and freedoms of all people. The UDHR, the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights form the International Bill of Rights. What are the ethics – or guiding principles – of human rights? There are five:
The writer explains that every content area in psychology stimulates numerous teachable moments with respect to ethical issues – the raw material is there, and it is simply a matter of casting course content in terms of its ethical dimension. When ethics content is seamlessly integrated across the curriculum, students come to understand that adhering to ethical principles is the responsibility of all members of the profession and they come to expect to be confronted with ethical dilemmas in many professional contexts.
Here are five techniques which author has in his ethics courses to help students explore the ethics of psychology—and their own ethics. They give you one example of each technique; you can take it from there and apply these to ethics in your personal life and your own profession. They make no claim that these are original, and this is certainly not a definitive list.
In response to a significant problem, this website approaches professional choices from a unified perspective that views decision making as an orderly process sharing essential characteristics in all of the mental health disciplines. More than that, it invites the user to interpret professional issues from a communitarian, rather than individualistic, perspective. With these issues in mind, the system for addressing professional dilemmas is useful for practitioners and students in mental health settings. Examples of the use of this system are offered in a variety of practice dilemmas presented in links to this page.
This document has been drafted with contributions from the Gender-based Violence Group and the Ethics Group at the CAMFIC. They have provided the basis for the work and the Groups bear the responsibility for the content.
With the increased interest and attention of the global community of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers toward rigorous intervention research for preventing VAW, a discussion of the ethical considerations specific to this type of research is warranted. As was highlighted by the WHO over a decade ago and by many others since then, the sensitive nature of research on VAW requires special ethical and safety considerations (1, 5, 7-10).
The United Nations released in this Compendium some basic principles, see here in particular article 16 – “Principles of Medical Ethics relevant to the role of health personnel….”
I should say Šrst that I don’t assume that human rights provide the only language or tools available in addressing global challenges. There is a rich body of international norms in the Šelds of labor and environmental protection, to name only two, that are today given too little importance but that should also serve as part of the “rules of the road” for an equitable and sustainable globalization process at different levels.
Health professionals` ethics and human rights violations, revealed in May 2004, CIA inspector generals report. “Physicians for Human Rights” is discussing in this article (8 p.) the CIA report (released in 2009) about the role health professionals played in the CIA`s torture program and the level of ethical misconduct.
The article discusses the challenges and opportunities faced when integrating participatory methods into human rights-based research. It describes the development of a participatory action research approach designed to fulfil the aim of undertaking advocacy-focused research grounded in human rights and community participation.
This website aims to provide with resources for teaching, studying, investigating ethical issues in mental health research. Collaboration at Saint Louis Univ., Missouri Inst. of Mental Health, Nat. Inst. of Health, and the Nat. Inst. of Mental Health.
This is an “international, peer-reviewed, web-based journal, available free online, worldwide. It aims at providing a useful forum for sharing ideas and experiences among all who are committed to improving ethical standards, behaviours, and choices in mental health caregiving”.
This paper reflects on some of the moral dilemmas inherent in the provision of counselling for Iraqi refugees by highlighting the day-to-day experiences of psychosocial counsellors employed by an international nongovernmental organization (INGO) in Jordan.
It is important for health professionals to have an ethical framework to help make decisions regarding psychosocial interventions in patients with addictive disorders. As patients with addictive disorders are vulnerable to unethical actions in the name of treatment, therapists need to aware of their role in delivering ethical care – not just in their own clinical practice but in the setting in which they deliver the interventions. This article aims to sensitize the health professional to the various areas in which ethical challenges may arise.
The CDA has developed some training materials, aiming to sensitize helpers in “Do No Harm“. This training was the result of projects to learn more about the assistance given in conflict settings (often used and misused to pursue political or military advantage). You can download hand- and workbooks, trainers package etc.
In the 1991 Moscow Document the OSCE participating States agreed that they will “encourage their competent authorities responsible for education programmes to design effective human rights related curricula and courses for students at all levels, particularly (…) students (…) attending public service schools.” These guidelines aim to support systemic and effective human rights education for health workers, and especially those who study to become health professionals or already carry out that important work.
The mission of the American Counseling Association is to enhance the quality of life in society by promoting the development of professional counselors, advancing the counseling profession, and using the profession and practice of counseling to promote respect for human dignity and diversity.
The United States Association for Body Psychotherapy (USABP) is an association of body-oriented psychotherapists, allied somatic practitioners, and interns trained in related modalities. The purpose of the USABP is to support the practice and further evolution of the field of body psychotherapy.
The “AMHCA Code” is an essential component of practicing clinical mental health counseling with professionalism and integrity. While ethical guidance for the practice of clinical mental health counseling is its primary purpose, it is also intended to prompt pondering about ethical thinking and practice. To be an ethical mental health counselor is to practice thinking ethically in an ongoing self-deliberation and in discussions with other mental health professionals.
Has published these meta-codes, referring otherwise to the ethical codes of their member associations.
The WMA has published its ethical guidelines in different languages, the English version (140 p.) will you find here.
Also here find we ethical principles documented by a large psychiatrist organization, to provide guidelines.
The NASW Code of Ethics is intended to serve as a guide to the everyday professional conduct of social workers.
The American Psychological Association has set up in this long article the general principles, and specific ethical standards according which they are working.
The American Psychiatric Association has here defined Medical Ethics, with annotations especially applicable to psychiatry.
The article discusses the necessity of research in conflict areas to improve the quality of assistance, considering the ethic principles in doing research in a vulnerable population, and the harm-benefit ratio
The author reports to the article by Gillon from 1994, discussing the four principles on examples.
The “four principles plus scope” approach provide a simple, accessible, and culturally neutral approach about ethical issues in health care. The principles: respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice. The article discusses these topics, and the conclusion in personal decision making.
This article (12 p.) discusses the necessity to review ethical principles in health, to ensure that human rights and dignity are fully respected. – Mamdouh Gabr, Cairo University.