Health and Human Security (original) (raw)
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Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 2017
In this article, I want to show that the securitization of health issues in the name of national interests led to the militarization of health care in the context of the war against terrorism. However, the connection between health and security also gave way to the emergence of the notion of human security, thus, converging with the human right to health approach and the cosmopolitan discourse on global health. These two perspectives on the relation between health and security lead to conflicting imperatives in the current state of counter-terrorism operations. I argue that when the securitization of health concerns in the name of national security conflicts with the provision of health care in the name of universal human rights, the higher moral end must trump the prudential one. Moreover, it is a duty to promote the human right to health when liberal democracies in foreign policies directly violate this moral ideal in the name of national security.
Towards a new definition of health security: A three-part rationale for the twenty-first century
Global Public Health, 2019
In recent years the framings of global health security have shifted while the structures governing global health have largely remained the same. One feature of the emerging reordering is the unresolved allocation of accountability between state and non-state actors. This brings to critical challenges to global health security to the fore. The first is that the consensus on the seeming shift from state to human security framing with regard to the global human right to health (security) risks losing its salience. Second, this conceptual challenge is mirrored on the operational level: if states and non-state actors do not assume responsibility for health security, who or what can guarantee health security? In order to address global health security against the backdrop of these twenty-first Century challenges, this article proceeds in three parts. First, it analyses the shortcomings of the current state-based World Health Organization (WHO) definition of health security. Second, taking into account the rising pressures posed to global health security and the inadequacy both of state-based and of ad hoc non-state responses, it proposes a new framing. Third, the article offers initial insights into the operational application of beyond state responses to (health) security challenges.
Sustainable Health for All? The Tension Between Human Security and the Right to Health Care
Journal of Human Security, 2015
In the current global environmental crisis medical aid and disaster relief is given by the UN and its branches, by governments and by NGOs, who regard it as their duty to address large-scale humanitarian catastrophes. The duty to give medical aid rests on traditional interpretations of health security and on the bioethical imperatives to relieve suffering and to save lives. However, those principles are not easily reconciled in the current situation of global environmental change and the threats it poses to human security. The global demand for health care has already outpaced resources in many regions, and those resources are likely to decline further. An ethic based on more comprehensive concepts of human security can lessen the contradictions between ethical priorities because it takes into account environmental security. However, that approach leads to clashes with common interpretations of human rights, including the so-called right to health care. The argument presented in this paper states that, under the imperative of ensuring the survival for humanity in acceptable and sustainable ways, the latest generation of human rights pertaining to health care and environmental quality have become ungrantable. While this does not render them negligible, it does necessitate a new approach to global development aid and health security, with severe consequences for individual autonomy.
Human Security: Expanding the Scope of Public Health (2003)
Human security is an evolving principle for organizing humanitarian endeavours in the tradition of public health. It places the welfare of people at the core of programmes and policies, is community oriented and preventive, and recognizes the mutual vulnerability of all people and the growing global interdependence that mark the current era. Health is a crucial domain of human security, providing a context within which to build partnerships across disciplines, sectors and agencies. These principles have been demonstrated in field programmes in which health-care delivery featuring multi-sectoral co-operation across conflict lines has been used to enhance human security. Such programmes can be a model for collaborative action, and can create the sustainable community infrastructure that is essential for human security.
Making health an imperative of foreign policy: The value of a human rights approach
Health and Human Rights, 2010
Health is increasingly seen as relevant to foreign policy; nevertheless, it remains subordinate to other interests. In particular, the interests of security and economics are often presented as more critical than health. This is due to a failure to sufficiently recognize the legal obligations that states have undertaken to ensure the human right to health. This article argues that health should be an imperative of foreign policy, equally valid, and prioritized in resource allocation. We suggest application of the human rights approach with attention to the legal duty of cooperation and the necessity of ensuring broad participation. We suggest that the human rights approach to health can contribute to achieving this result and is compatible with, and beneficial to, other foreign policy concerns. Finally, we conclude that the human rights approach to health requires that health be an imperative in foreign policymaking processes. introduction Despite recent significantly increased attention to global health in foreign policy, the relationship between policy and the many aspects of health remains unclear. Is attention to health issues merely a means for achieving other foreign policy goals? Is health an imperative that foreign policy must take into account? The relationship between health and foreign policy is "vital, complex and contested." 2 In this paper we argue that such a relationship is also crucial for the "attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health." 3 Health is often subordinate to other foreign policy concerns despite the fact that states are obliged to fulfill, through their foreign policy, the solemn international legal commitments they have undertaken to ensure the human right to health. In this paper we argue that states can enhance their ability to meet their international commitments by adopting a human rights approach to health (HRAH). This, we argue, will make achieving improved global health an imperative of foreign policy. Our argument is organized into four parts. First, we review a number of common perceptions about the relationship between health and other foreign policy interests that have confined health to a subordinate role. Second, we suggest how the application of an HRAH can contribute to making health an imperative of foreign policy. Third, we look at the important requirement of participation. Fourth and finally, we discuss briefly the limitations of the HRAH.
Communicable Diseases, Health Security, and Human Rights
Foundations of Global Health & Human Rights
This chapter examines the influence of human rights in the quest to control communicable diseases. Communicable diseases are emerging and spreading faster than ever before, with devastating consequences for the most vulnerable in a rapidly globalizing world. Human rights have come to frame infectious disease control, beginning in the early response to AIDS and expanding from the stigmatization of marginalized populations to include the provision of essential medicines. Human rights claims have correspondingly expanded, arising out of norms of non-discrimination, consent, and privacy and now including the right to health. As individual rights compete with state authority, the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) International Health Regulations (2005) aim to guide states in a rights-based response to communicable disease. However, as seen in recent Ebola outbreaks, human rights have lost priority to health security as the dominant frame for health policy, and this securitization of co...
The Right to Health: Then, Now and a Call to Arms
Health and human rights, 2020
I first became involved with right to health issues around the time of the launching of the Health and Human Rights Journal when I became director of a human rights program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Having spent nearly 10 years in Africa, I gravitated toward economic and social rights and then the right to health naively believing the human rights rhetoric that all rights are considered interdependent and equal in status and respect. When I became aware that it was not the case, particularly in the United States, where economic and social rights were, and still often are, relegated to the status of aspirational goals, I thought that better conceptualizing the scope and content of states' obligations would confer more respect. To that end, I organized several projects and worked with members of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights who were engaged in developing a general comment on the right to health. The general comment, which was adopted in 2000, contributed toward the goal of better understanding the conceptual scope of the right to health and related state obligations. But obviously, it was not the magic wand encouraging governments to take the right to health more seriously that I had assumed it would be. Nor have been the many significant articles published in the Health and Human Rights Journal. Yet both have contributed toward a better understanding of health and human rights issues. I now see the challenges to implementing the right to health quite differently. I understand far better that the political, social, and economic environment in which we live, more specifically the neoliberal policies that have dominated many countries and international agencies during the past 35 years, present significant obstacles to the realization of economic and social rights. I wrote in Global Health, Human Rights, and the Challenges of Neoliberal Policies, that ironically, as the right to health has evolved and become more widely recognized as an appropriate normative foundation and ethical requirement for health policy development, there has been a global paradigm shift engendered by the increasing hegemony of neoliberal ideology and policies. 1 Neoliberalism contends that markets are the appropriate basis for organizing all areas of economic and social life regardless of their deleterious effects on human welfare and dignity. In contrast with a human rights approach, which conceptualizes health to be a social good contributing to human welfare, neoliberal policies consider health service to be an economic commodity. As such, the availability of health services depends on having the resources to pay for them. Human rights vest fundamental responsibility for realizing human rights obligations in the state and thereby requires a strong and effective state apparatus able to realize human rights obligations. In contrast, neoliberalism promotes political policies minimizing the role of the state and advocates transferring the provision of health and other social services to the private sector on a for-profit basis. All of this makes the realization of human