Since its inception, the CHR has taken action in support of more than 1,500 colleagues subjected to serious human rights violations, often because of their research and professional activities, in all regions of the world. The Committee works with other human rights organizations and scholarly institutions to advocate and provide assistance to threatened colleagues, including in its role as the Secretariat for the International Human Rights Network of Academies & Scholarly Societies (IHRN).
“The international advocacy is not symbolic. We know that it can save lives and careers in many countries.”
—Şebnem Korur Fincancı, Turkish forensic physician and human rights activist
Over the decades, the CHR has also increasingly worked to raise awareness of and help address global challenges at the intersection of human rights and science, engineering, and health, from exploring ways to improve detection and clearance of anti-personnel land mines to possibilities for preventing assaults on health care in the United States and globally.
The science and health dimensions of forced displacement are wide-ranging and impact numerous internationally protected rights—including the rights to privacy, education, and work. Alongside its support for individual colleagues who have been displaced, the Committee has partnered with Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement to develop pilot STEM courses on forced displacement.
Climate change has serious implications for a range of internationally protected human rights, such as the right to a healthy environment and the right to life. The CHR has developed a resource collection on issues at the intersection of human rights and climate change for those interested in learning more about this topic.
New technologies—from digital evidence collection tools to large language models—have the potential both to enhance and to erode human rights. The CHR has examined the human rights potential of new technologies through numerous meetings, symposia, and other events.
Promoting and protecting the right to health for all people, including by addressing violence against health care providers, is a core part of the CHR’s work. The Committee has conducted behind-the-scenes advocacy for hundreds of health professionals subjected to unjust trials, arbitrary detention, and other forms of severe ill-treatment. The CHR’s Forum to Address Attacks on Health Professionals, created in 2022, brings together domestic and international health care associations to help address violence against health professionals and health care, in the United States and around the world. The Executive Committee of the IHRN, for which the CHR serves as Secretariat, has long worked to draw attention to the problem of violence against health care workers throughout the world, from attacks in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and other conflict zones to assaults against U.S. medics providing care to injured protestors.
Academic freedom is foundational to the ability of scientists and scholars to carry out their work. The CHR has developed resource collections designed to assist and empower colleagues in the face of threats to their ability to research, teach, and conduct other academic activities.
One of the ways CHR has worked to promote academic freedom is through its efforts to support Turkish colleagues who were among hundreds of scholars summarily dismissed from their universities in 2016 and 2017 and prevented from traveling outside of their country as a result of their peaceful exercise of internationally protected rights. The CHR partnered with Carnegie Mellon University on a distance fellowship program, which provided wrongfully dismissed Turkish colleagues with resources, such as online library access, necessary for continuing their research and publishing work in their disciplines.
In the early 1970s, the leadership and members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) rallied in support of NAS international member Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who was targeted for decades by USSR government officials and fellow scientists in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union for his peaceful expression of pro-democracy sentiments and human rights advocacy. Their desire to support Sakharov and other threatened scientists and researchers became the driving force behind the formal establishment of the Committee on Human Rights (CHR) in 1976. In 1994, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine (then the Institute of Medicine) joined the NAS as full sponsors of the CHR.
For over a decade, the CHR undertook a range of actions to seek justice in the case of Myrna Mack, a Guatemalan anthropologist murdered by the Guatemalan military in 1990 because of her research on the unjust treatment of internally displaced people in the country. Working closely with Myrna’s sister, Helen, in her pursuit of justice, the CHR undertook several missions to Guatemala to meet with government officials and observe the trial of three former high-level Guatemalan military officials who were charged with ordering Myrna’s assassination. The CHR also published three reports, organized hundreds of appeals from members of the U.S. scientific community to high-level Guatemalan officials, and held meetings with U.S. officials. In 2004, one of the three military officials was convicted of ordering Myrna’s murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison, marking the first time in Guatemalan history that a high-level military official had been brought to justice for atrocities committed during Guatemala's 30-year civil war.
In 1987, the CHR undertook a mission to Somalia to investigate the imprisonment of nearly a dozen colleagues under harsh conditions for the nonviolent expression of their beliefs and published a report containing its findings. The CHR was one of very few human rights delegations permitted entry into Somalia at the time, likely due to its largely nonpublic approach to advocacy. Following the mission, the CHR was notified by Somali authorities that the colleagues concerned had been released. The then NAS President, Frank Press, had joined the CHR in appealing to high-level Somali officials for their release.
“I honestly believe your unrelenting pressure was instrumental to my eventual release…The damages inflicted on me physically and psychologically during my prison years will linger for some time…but learning about your pressure and its effects has already healed some of the wounds.”
—Somali colleague supported by the CHR The CHR has served as the Secretariat of the International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies (IHRN), an international consortium of honorary societies in the sciences, engineering, and medicine with a shared interest in human rights, since the network’s creation. Founded in 1993 to alert national academies to human rights abuses involving fellow scientists and scholars and to equip academies with the tools to provide support in such cases, the IHRN today also supports the independence and autonomy of national academies and scholarly societies worldwide and raises awareness of the connections between human rights and STEMM. Through action alerts, biennial meetings, and resource production, the IHRN helps academies become more involved in human rights work.
Connecting scholars who are threatened, displaced, or otherwise unable to safely do their work with individuals or groups able to provide assistance is an important part of the Committee’s work. The CHR relies on its close collaboration with groups like Scholars at Risk and the Institute of International Education (IIE)’s Scholar Rescue Fund to help scholars fleeing persecution find temporary academic placements. Following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, the CHR assisted several scholars in securing fellowships, scholarships, or other forms of support necessary to continue their scholarly work or education in safe third countries. The CHR’s work to support at-risk Afghan colleagues complemented other efforts at the National Academies.
A growing area of interest for the CHR is educating the next generation of scientists, engineers, and health professionals on the connections between human rights and their disciplines. The CHR has co-developed interdisciplinary STEMM curriculum on human rights and forced displacement, and courses rooted in this curriculum have now been permanently added to multiple university catalogs. It has also created resource collections covering topics—from climate change to digital data to COVID-19—useful for teaching human rights dimensions across STEMM.
Beginning in early 2020, the CHR initiated numerous activities in response to human rights concerns connected to the pandemic. The Committee mounted an urgent campaign for the release of arbitrarily detained colleagues acutely vulnerable to COVID-19, advocated for researchers and health professionals who came under attack as a result of their work to combat the disease, and—through virtual events and resource collections—worked to inform the public about safeguarding human rights during public health emergencies. As Secretariat for the IHRN, the CHR produced a repository of information containing activities by national academies throughout the world to help promote and protect human rights during the pandemic.
Prompted by concerns regarding the reported involvement of medical personnel in unethical treatment of detainees at the U.S. Guantánamo Bay detention center, the CHR advocated for clear ethical guidelines for health professionals working at U.S. military and other government facilities that accord with international human rights principles. The Committee’s efforts included advocacy for individual colleagues and awareness raising events and led to the creation of an NAM Interest Group that meets annually to explore issues at the intersection of human rights and medical ethics.
“[Name redacted] took considerable comfort at Guantanamo from knowing that a committee of the National Academy of Sciences was supporting him. At a place where everything was done to make him feel worthless, your support helped him retain some sense of himself.”
—lawyer for a colleague held at Guantanamo Bay
