From Conception to Realization: A Human Right to Health (original) (raw)
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This article tracks the shifting place of the international right to health, and human rights-based approaches to health, in the scholarly literature and United Nations (UN). From 1993 to 1994, the focus began to move from the right to health toward human rights-based approaches to health, including human rights guidance adopted by UN agencies in relation to specific health issues. There is a compelling case for a human rights-based approach to health, but it runs the risk of playing down the right to health, as evidenced by an examination of some UN human rights guidance. The right to health has important and distinctive qualities that are not provided by other rights-consequently, playing down the right to health can diminish rights-based approaches to health, as well as the right to health itself. Because general comments, the reports of UN Special Rapporteurs, and UN agencies' guidance are exercises in interpretation, I discuss methods of legal interpretation. I suggest that...
Journal of Public Health Policy, 2010
Rights-based approaches (RBAs) to health encompass an exciting range of ways that the United Nations, governments, and nongovernmental organizations incorporate human rights into public health efforts. By reviewing the academic literature and discrepant articulations of human rights and RBAs by key institutions, the authors identify common rights principles relevant to health and discuss a framework to improve implementation and guide assessment of the contributions of RBAs to health.
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Human rights, including the right to health, are grounded in protecting and promoting human dignity. Although commitment to human dignity is a widely shared value, the precise meaning and requirements behind the term are elusive. It is also unclear as to how a commitment to human dignity translates into specific human rights, such as the right to the highest attainable standard of health, and delineates their scope and obligations. The resulting lack of clarity about the foundations of and justification for the right to health has been problematic in a number of ways. This article identifies the strengths of and some of the issues with the grounding of the right to health in human dignity. It then examines ethical and philosophical expositions of human dignity and several alternative foundations proposed for the right to health, including capability theory and the work of Norman Daniels, to assess whether any offer a richer and more adequate conceptual grounding for the right to health.
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ABSTRACT This paper explores the legal contours of the field of ‘health and human rights’ as a new and emerging field of human rights law. After an analysis of its conceptual foundations, it illustrates how health and human rights evolved from a phase of standard-setting to a field that was primarily addressed by public health experts, to a field that is haphazardly, but increasingly, addressed by legal scholars and practitioners. Subsequently, it briefly analyses the practice of judicial and quasi-judicial international bodies, in particular in the context of the UN and the Council of Europe, and it explores the legal perspectives of two important health and human rights-related topics: reproductive health, including the issue of abortion, and socio-economic health inequalities.
Vand. J. Transnat'l L., 2005
Codifying, and then implementing, an international right to health, health care, or protection is beset with serious roadblocksforemost among them being contentious issues of indeterminacy, justiciability, and progressive realization. Although advanced-and to some degree recognized under the rubric of a social or cultural entitlement within the law of human rights and, more particularly, the U.S. Declaration on Human Rights, together with International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, and presently UNESCO's Draft Declaration on Universal Norms on Bioethics-attainment of such a universal right to health remains at best dubious. The central impediment to the recognition of such a right is determining the extent to which a sustained level of economic stability must be charted before a state can be seen as either recognizing or enforcing a right to health of any kind and at any level of magnitude. Indeed, under the ICESCR, realization of economic social and cultural rights is to be effected only under a standard of progressivity. In other words, so long a states move "progressively" toward the realization of these rights, no actionable violations will be sustained. This, then, results in a flawed enforcement mechanism which allows any state signatory to this foundational covenant to pace enforcement of the rights under the ICESCR according to national standards of political will and
Theological Studies, 2008
The AIDS pandemic has focused renewed attention on the relationship between the promotion of health and the protection of human rights. Recent work by Paul Farmer and others challenges bioethics to address urgent questions of global health equity not only on the level of method but in the form of strategic partnerships with the most vulnerable populations. This article highlights both the promise and the limits of a human rights framework for bioethics. * * * We thus find ourselves at a crossroads: health care can be considered a commodity to be sold, or it can be considered a basic social right. It cannot comfortably be considered both of these at the same time. This, I believe, is the great drama of medicine at the start of this century. And this is the choice before all people of faith and good will in these dangerous times. 1 I T HAS BEEN SAID that there is "no more vibrant, hope-filled or complex idea alive in the world today than human rights and dignity for all." 2 From the difficulty of overcoming Western emphases on the individual that underlie international human rights documents to the persistent gap between rhetoric and action, human rights are indeed a complex (even fractious) foundation for ethics in a globally conscious age. The recent call by Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and MAURA A. RYAN received her Ph.D. from Yale University and is currently the John Cardinal O'Hara, C.S.C., Associate Professor of Christian Ethics in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Specializing in bioethics, Catholic moral theology, feminist ethics, and social ethics, she has recently edited with Brian F. Linnane and contributed a chapter to A Just