Unhealed Wounds: The Faces Behind the Injuries of Crowd-Control Weapons

Press Release

15 March 2019 – International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations (INCLO) marks today the International Day Against Police Brutality with the launch of a multimedia project that highlights the dangerous nature of crowd-control weapons and the lasting impact they have on people’s lives and deaths.

Unhealed Wounds: The Faces Behind the Injuries of Crowd-Control Weapons combines photography, video and audio recordings to bring to light the faces and stories of people injured by crowd-control weapons during protests. At the time of the events most of the 12 men and women highlighted in this project were either protesters, publicly expressing their grievances and demands in different parts of the world, or accidental passers-by.

Their personal accounts are powerful testimonies of the harmful effects of these weapons. “Amid the coughing and the tears that the gas produces, I began to feel the rubber bullets. Three projectiles hit my face, one of them in the eye and another in the temple. The one that hit me in the temple left me stunned and with a buzzing in my head, and the one that hit my eye left me blind in that eye,” said Daniel Sandoval, a teacher from Argentina who was injured while protesting against pension and social reform in Buenos Aires in December 2017.

Police institutions all around the world often use these dangerous weapons to stifle dissent. In the context of protests, this practice escalates tensions, creates panic and causes long-lasting psychological traumas, serious injuries, disabilities and even deaths. Ultimately, the misuse of crowd-control weapons interferes with people’s right to freedom of expression and assembly and undermines respect for human rights.

The artistic approach to this project was inspired by the work of the Israeli photographer Tali Mayer, who also coordinated this project. “I found that there is a strong contradiction between the restrictions of these weapons on paper and their actual use on the streets by the police. Working on an international project made it clear to me that their misuse is in fact a common practice in many countries around the world. I hope that Unhealed Wounds will help ignite a discussion in our societies on how we deal with the long-lasting tension between the law enforcement and people, with the primary demand to keep us safe,” Mayer said.

INCLO and its member organizations contributed closely in devising the concept and producing all the materials. The photos and videos were commissioned from local photographers and artists from Argentina, Colombia, Egypt, Hungary, India, Israel, Kenya, Russia, South Africa and the United States. With the exception of the Russian and Egyptian cases, all videos were taken at the location where the incidents happened.

Unhealed Wounds builds on the ground-breaking research conducted by INCLO in close collaboration with Physicians for Human Rights and published in a joint report titled Lethal in Disguise. INCLO advocates for the protection and promotion of the rights to protest and calls for stricter regulation of the use of crowd-control weapons at the national and international levels.

Links:

Contact:

Lucila Santos – INCLO Programmes Director – [email protected]