Rights-Based Approaches to Health Policies and Programmes: Articulations, Ambiguities and Assessment (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Rights-Based Approaches to Health Policies and Programs: Articulations, Ambiguities, and Assessments
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.
Human rights approach to health
Croatian medical journal, 2002
Adopting human rights approach to health carries many benefits, because it emphasizes the equality of all persons and their inherent right to health as the foundation of the health care system. It also argues that promotion and protection of health are fundamentally important social goals, focuses particularly on the needs of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable communities, balances individual needs with the common good, and so forth. However, it also raises some practical issues, such as organization of interdisciplinary education and work, and different use of the language, which often goes unacknowledged. The relationship between human rights and health is a reciprocal one, and can be beneficial or harmful. For the relationship to be beneficial and successful, the differences between human rights and public health approach to health, centered around the perspective taking, attitudes, and abilities of health professionals, need to be acknowledged and reconciled, and the need for...
Using indicators to determine the contribution of human rights to public health efforts
Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 2009
There is general agreement on the need to integrate human rights into health policies and programmes, although there is still reluctance to go beyond rhetorical acknowledgement of their assumed significance. To determine the actual value of human rights for the effectiveness of public health efforts requires clarity about what their incorporation looks like in practice and how to assess their contribution. Despite the pervasive use of indicators in the public health field, indicators that specifically capture human rights concerns are not ...
Interpreting the International Right to Health in a Human Rights-Based Approach to Health
Health and human rights, 2016
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...
Realizing human rights-based approaches for action on the social determinants of health
PubMed, 2010
Health inequities are clear evidence of violations of the right to health. Yet despite this common ground, action on the social determinants of health aiming to reduce health inequities is sometimes disconnected from implementation of human rights-based approaches. This is explained in part by differing histories, disciplines, and epistemologies. The capacity of human rights instruments to alter policies on social determinants can seem limited. An absolutist focus on individuals and processes can seem at odds with the attention to differences in population health outcomes central to the concern for health equity. However, developments in rights-based approaches have seen the terrain of human rights increasingly address social determinants. Human rights provide a firm legal basis for tackling the inequities in power and resources that the Commission on Social Determinants of Health identifies as fundamental to achieving health equity. Indicators and benchmarks developed for rights-based approaches to health systems can be developed further within health sectors and translated to other sectors and disciplines. The discourse and evidence base of social determinants can also contribute to implementing rights-based approaches, as its resultant policy momentum can provide essential levers to realize the right to health. Therefore, there is no clear-cut delineation between the human rights and health equity movements, and both may constructively work together to realize their goals. Such constructive collaboration will not prove straightforward; it will, instead, require profound engagement and innovations in both theory and practice. Yet this effort represents an important opportunity for those who seek social justice in health.
Making the Case: What Is the Evidence of Impact of Applying Human Rights-Based Approaches to Health?
Health and human rights, 2015
This special issue of the Health and Human Rights Journal constitutes another step on the path toward making the case for human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) to health. In 2003, the United Nations (UN) outlined the pillars of an HRBA to development, which include universality and inalienability, indivisibility, interdependence and interrelatedness, non-discrimination and equality, participation and inclusion, and accountability and the rule of law. 1 Since then, leaders from national governments and UN agencies have repeatedly emphasized the need to operationalize human rights and incorporate them into the implementation of policies, programs, projects, and other health-related interventions with a view to enhancing effectiveness. 2 Nevertheless, implementation efforts regarding HRBAs to health and development have faced, and continue to face, multiple challenges, including some degree of miscommunication and polarization between different fields, where the imperatives of health and human rights are not always seen as complementary and rights imperatives are misconstrued to ignore all concerns regarding cost-effectiveness. Even for sympathetic actors and institutions, there is a need to gather sufficient evidence of the impact of human rights to be persuasive to policy makers, donors, and the public alike. 3 Measuring evidence of impact is far from simple in an HRBA. It challenges three fields-human rights, public health, and medicine (as well as related communities and disciplines)-to bridge epistemological differences about the nature of what constitutes evidence and impact, as well as how to establish those truths. To begin with, the outcome of interest is not necessarily just the health outcome, or output, measured by such indicators as "deaths averted"; rather, HRBAs require both conventional health indicators and new measures for assessing effects. These effects include changes in legal and policy frameworks, as well as other qualitative changes. It may also be necessary to consider symbolic or ideational effects of HRBAs, such as transformations in public attitudes and perceptions, and the appropriation of a sense of entitlement, as some authors in this issue note. Standards of evidence also present challenges. As the experiences described in Mexico, Peru, India, and elsewhere underscore, HRBAs are inherently multi-level and multi-factorial, deeply embedded in social contexts and relationships. Standard medical and public health tools that rely
Human Rights in Global Health, by Benjamin Mason Meier and Lawrence O. Gostin
Global Governance, 2018
University Press, 2018. "Mainstreaming" human rights into development practice is no longer a new concept: the "Rights-based Approach to Development" now plays a large role in the thinking of many development agencies, from UN bodies and government agencies to local non-governmental organizations. Despite this, there is still a lot of fuzzy and incomplete thinking about the relationship between development and human rights. Where health and health care are concerned, the di culty of establishing a rights-based approach is particularly acute. ere are many reasons for this: medically-trained personnel are often not well equipped to consider rights; pressing priorities to provide immediate care can overwhelm long-term deep thinking on rights; donors and recipients both sometimes shy away from the political implications; and the list can be continued almost indefinitely. In Human Rights in Global Health Benjamin Mason Meier and Lawrence O. Gostin have collected a comprehensive set of chapters looking at the mainstreaming of health and human rights from numerous perspectives. Chapters cover both those agencies that have done a good job at considering how health and human rights interact-for example, UNICEF-and some who have struggled a bit, such as the UN Population Fund or even the World Health Organization. e unifying theme of these chapters is the political and bureaucratic challenge of defining human rights in highly-technical fields, and across a wide variety of organizations with very di erent missions and cultures. We clearly see that many agencies have established a desire to consider health and human rights as integral issues, but struggle to figure out how this fits with their traditional roles. e volume spends more time on the problem of governance than on programming: that is, how we grapple with the problem of integrating human rights into programming rather than what that actually looks like on the ground. Crucially several of the contributions also distinguish the rights-based approach to health from a human right to health, which are all too often conflated. Many chapters seem particularly strong on the history of rights and health: the institutional emphasis is clear in the stories told about organizational transformation, as ideas on rights filter through the UN system and are more or less successfully implemented. What emerges from this useful volume are both the di culty of overcoming this gap, and the number of bodies at work on the problem. It is a useful reference not only for those interested in global health but human rights mainstreaming in general, although it is not designed to imbue optimism. Reviewed by Joel E.
Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 2019
This groundbreaking compilation-edited by two scholars who helped to establish the "health and human rights" field-systematically explores the structures and processes of human rights implementation in global health institutions, arguing that a rights-based approach to health governance advances global health. This 640-page volume brings together forty-six experienced scholars and practitioners who have contributed to twenty-five chapters organized into six thematic sections. This "unprecedented collection of experts" provides unique, hands-on insights into how the "institutional determinants of the rights-based approach to health" facilitate-or hinder-the "mainstreaming" of human rights into global health interventions. The "institutional determinants," which, in the contributors' view, promote the effective integration of human rights implementation into global health governance, are: "governance" (formal commitments, human rights leadership, and member State support); "bureaucracy" (institutional structure and human rights culture); "collaborations" (inter-organizational partnerships and civil society participation); and "accountability" (internal monitoring and independent evaluation).