Article 2 of the 1864 Geneva Convention provides:
Hospital and ambulance personnel, including the quarter-master’s staff, the medical, administrative and transport services … shall have the benefit of the same neutrality [as military hospitals and ambulances] when on duty, and while there remain any wounded to be brought in or assisted.
Geneva Convention (1906)
Article 9 of the 1906 Geneva Convention provides:
The personnel charged exclusively with the removal, transportation, and treatment of the sick and wounded, as well as with the administration of sanitary formations and establishments … shall be respected and protected under all circumstances. If they fall into the hands of the enemy they shall not be considered as prisoners of war...
“There was the case of OHSU, their tent was destroyed,” Heisler said. “There was one day where the police actually took their supplies.”...
August 4, 2020
By Jonathan Levinson
A team of experts with Physicians for Human Rights, (click here) a New York-based group that documents rights violations, spent seven days in Portland investigating the use of crowd control weapons against protesters and law enforcement violence directed at volunteer medical staff.
That team released its findings Tuesday ahead of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C.
“PHR has concluded that the response by federal agents that it documented in Portland was disproportionate, excessive, and indiscriminate, and deployed in ways that caused severe injury to innocent civilians, including medics,” the report states.
Dr. Michele Heisler, PHR’s medical director, led the team visiting Portland. Heisler said they didn’t see any official EMTs or paramedics at the protests and that medical care was left to volunteers and civil society.
The report cites numerous instances where law enforcement deliberately targeted volunteer medics and their supplies.
