Perspectives On Health And Human Rights

This anthology of articles collected by a cast of award-winning scholars in the field of public health illustrates that promoting and protecting human rights is fundamental to promoting and protecting health. New issues covered in this volume include: emerging technologies; family and health; responding to violence; and methods and strategies.

The right to health, having been previously neglected is now being deployed more and more often in litigation, activism and policy-making across the world. International bodies such as the WHO, UNAIDS, World Bank and WTO are increasingly using or being evaluated with reference to health rights, and international NGOs frequently use the language of rights in campaigning and in more concrete litigation. This book brings together an impressive array of internationally renowned scholars in the areas of law, philosophy and health policy to critically interrogate the development of rights based approaches to health. The volume integrates discussion of the right to health at a theoretical level in law and ethics, with the difficult substantive issues where the right is relevant, and with emerging systems of global health governance. The contributions to this volume will add to our theoretical and practical understanding of rights based approaches to health.

This book aims to bolster the burgeoning discourse of health and human rights. In so doing, it charts the history of the linkage between health and human rights. It also pinpoints the sense of imperative that surrounds this relationship. More importantly, the book identifies a series of threats and challenges facing attempts to link health and human rights and proposes how these might be addressed. Amongst other things, it asks: is conflict between risk and rights inevitable in the context of infectious disease control? Is reproductive choice a bad argument in the context of reproductive technologies? Is it sensible for human rights to make use of measurement tools such as indicators? Is the 'cost of human rights' an argument that can and should be used by proponents of human rights? The answers it gives to these questions are original and engaging and will be of great interest to a diverse audience, including scholars and policy-makers in these areas.

Institutions matter for the advancement of human rights in global health. Given the dramatic development of human rights under international law and the parallel proliferation of global institutions for public health, there arises an imperative to understand the implementation of human rights through global health governance. This volume examines the evolving relationship between human rights, global governance, and public health, studying an expansive set of health challenges through a multi-sectoral array of global organizations. To analyze the structural determinants of rights-based governance, the organizations in this volume include those international bureaucracies that implement human rights in ways that influence public health in a globalizing world. This volume brings together leading health and human rights scholars and practitioners from academia, non-governmental organizations, and the United Nations system. They explore the foundations of human rights as a normative framework for global health governance, the mandate of the World Health Organization to pursue a human rights-based approach to health, the role of inter-governmental organizations across a range of health-related human rights, the influence of rights-based economic governance on public health, and the focus on global health among institutions of human rights governance. Contributing chapters each map the distinct human rights efforts within a specific institution of global governance for health. Through the comparative institutional analysis in this volume, the contributing authors examine institutional dynamics to operationalize human rights in organizational policies, programs, and practices and assess institutional factors that facilitate or inhibit human rights mainstreaming for global health advancement.

This timely book offers a fresh perspective on how to effectively address the issue of unequal access to healthcare. It analyses the human right to health from the underexplored legal principle of solidarity, proposing a non-commercial understanding of the positive obligations inherent in the right to health.

Interrogates the development of rights based approaches to health. This title integrates discussions of the right to health at a theoretical and practical level, and engages with the systems of global health governance.

Health and Human Rights in a Changing World is a comprehensive and contemporary collection of readings and original material examining health and human rights from a global perspective. Editors Grodin, Tarantola, Annas, and Gruskin are well-known for their previous two volumes (published by Routledge) on this increasingly important subject to the global community. The editors have contextualized each of the five sections with foundational essays; each reading concludes with discussion topics, questions, and suggested readings. This book also includes Points of View sections—originally written perspectives by important authors in the field. Section I is a Health and Human Rights Overview that lays out the essential knowledge base and provides the foundation for the following sections. Section II brings in notions of concepts, methods, and governance framing the application of health and human rights, in particular the Human Rights-based Approaches to Health. Section III sheds light on issues of heightened vulnerability and special protection, stressing that the health and human rights record of any nation, any community, is determined by what is being done and not done about those who are most in need. Section IV focuses on addressing system failures where health and human rights issues have been documented, recognized, even at times proclaimed as priorities, and yet insufficiently attended to as a result of State denial, unwillingness, or incapacity. Section V examines the relevance of the health and human rights paradigm to a changing world, underscoring contemporary global challenges and responses. Finally, a Concluding Note brings together the key themes of this set of articles and attempts to project a vision of the future.

People with mental disorders often suffer the worst conditions of life.This book is the first comprehensive survey of the mental health/human rights relationship. It examines the relationships and histories of mental health and human rights, and their interconnections with law, culture, ethnicity, class, economics, biology, and stigma.