Page 107 - Human Rights

Faculty of Nursing
Adult care Nursing Department

practice. 5: Stewardship and governance Stewardship and governance of nursing and midwifery

services involve the government, civil society and the professions to ensure the quality of care.

3.4 Responding to human rights abuses: the nursing role

Professional associations and individual nurses and midwives can play a greater role in combating
human rights violations and promoting human rights awareness within the nursing professions.

3.4.1 Advocacy

Amnesty International’s commitment to preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to

physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from
discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights, is supported by many

national and international professional nursing bodies.

The Nurse’s Role in Safeguarding Human Rights, a statement adopted by the ICN in 1983, notes

that “nurses have individual responsibility but they can often be more effective if they approach
human rights issues as a group”.

Nurses can be confronted by human rights violations as witnesses, when they or colleagues are

put under pressure to ignore, participate in or cover up violations, or in the documenting or

exposure of abuses.

In the section below, various avenues of advocacy are explored, with reference to specific case

examples.

Nurse human rights activism in action
Many nurses are engaged in human rights activism around the world.

Ken Agar-Newman is one of them.

Ken has been a member of Amnesty International in Canada for more than two decades.

103 Academic Year 2025/2026