In October 2021, on the historic grounds of the Peace Palace in the Hague, Global Rights Compliance (GRC) in collaboration with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) and supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, hosted a unique high-level event featuring the Netherlands premiere of the Oscar® nominated and critically acclaimed film, Hunger Ward. This is an intimate, unflinching portrait of the suffering and resilience of the Yemeni people.
As the director, Skye Fitzgerald, noted the film,
“seeks to go beyond the mind-numbing statistics accompanying the conflict and instead places the viewer in two therapeutic feeding centers as doctors and nurses treat children who have been starved during the course of the conflict.”
The event highlighted the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, including addressing how humanitarian access violations impede the work of organisations, such as UN OCHA and WFP, and attempted to determine how political will can be harnessed to prevent man-made starvation.
GRC has been engaged in advancing the conflict and hunger agenda since 2017, supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In September 2021, GRC and Mwatana for Human Rights released their landmark report titled “Starvation Makers”, following a year-long investigation into attacks and other conduct by the Saudi/UAE-led coalition and the Ansar Allah armed group. This unique report concluded that
“[w]arring parties in Yemen have deliberately deprived civilians of objects essential to their survival (OIS), starving them, in some cases to death, over the course of the conflict”.
GRC and Mwatana are actively engaged in the pursuit of legal pathways and further investigations to hold perpetrators of the starvation crimes listed in Starvation Makers to account, including via universal jurisdiction claims. In late March 2022, GRC will convene a workshop with Mwatana’s investigators in Amman (Jordan) to provide training on GRC’s Revised Starvation Training Manual and investigative toolkit. The training will build upon lessons learned from investigations carried out for the Starvation Makers report and will aim to develop capacity towards the creation of case-building files and legal dossiers.
HUNGER WARD trailer from Spin Film on Vimeo.
DONATE – If you would like to directly support the two clinics in the movie, you can donate at hungerward.org. You can also donate through the UN Crisis Relief to help the UN and humanitarian partners to rapidly provide food, shelter and health services to the Yemeni people.
