Michel Thieren

Michel Thieren is a Belgian physician specializing in humanitarian affairs and human rights and was head of office in northern Bosnia for the World Health Organization.

Libyan justice: medicine on death row

On 19 December 2006, a Libyan judge announced a verdict in the final appeal of six foreign health workers accused of deliberately infecting 426 children with HIV at the al-Fateh

By Michel Thieren

/ 23 Feb 2011

Cambodia: a patient waiting

"May the tevoda grant us good health and prosperity, freeing us from suffering and fear. [...] I am finishing my call, o nineteen pralung, come back all together now. There

By Michel Thieren

/ 15 May 2009

Deaths in Iraq: the numbers game, revisited

A third assessment of post-invasion violent deaths in Iraq was published on 9 January 2008 by the New England Journal of Medicine, a prestigious platform for medical research and scientific

By Michel Thieren

/ 11 Jan 2008

Deaths in Iraq: how many, and why it matters

Two scientifically audited numbers today constitute the best available and most cited evidence quantifying Iraqi civilian deaths directly associated with the war in that country which began in March 2003.

By Michel Thieren

/ 10 Jan 2008

"Terror doctors": anatomy of a void concept

On 2 July 2007, British police authorities announced that all eight people tied to the failed terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow on 29-30 June were medical professionals. Doctors? How

By Michel Thieren

/ 12 Jul 2007

Medicine and public health in dark times

Hannah Arendt's "dark times" were times of political upheaval during which the mere acts of doing good and refraining from evil were nothing short of extraordinary

By Michel Thieren

/ 24 Apr 2007

Dayton plus ten: Europe interrogated

It took three weeks of intense negotiations in an inhospitable military airbase in Ohio for three heads of states Yugoslavias Slobodan Milosevic, Bosnias Alija Izetbegovic and Croatias

By Michel Thieren and Louise L Lambrichs

/ 24 Nov 2005

Kashmir: brothers in aid

The Kashmir earthquake is still claiming its victims, but Michel Thieren sees humanitarian and political lessons from hurricane Katrina being applied in its painful aftermath. Within two months of each

By Michel Thieren

/ 16 Oct 2005

Katrina's triple failure: technical, ethical, political

The experience of disaster management around the world has three lessons for the United States, says Michel Thieren. Political storms follow the management of natural disasters with the inevitability of

By Michel Thieren

/ 6 Sep 2005

There was genocide in Srebrenica

I once recommended that Srebrenica be fenced in as a memorial to the suffering and death inflicted by genocide. Today, half the Serb population denies genocide ever took place. The

By Michel Thieren

/ 10 Jul 2005