Health and human rights
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Health and human rights · Jan 2006
Human rights abuses and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS: the experiences of Burmese women in Thailand.
We investigated human rights concerns related to migration, living and working conditions, and access to HIV/AIDS services and reproductive health services for Burmese women in Thailand. Vulnerability to HIV/AIDS for Burmese women stemmed from abuses they experienced: gender and ethnic discrimination, including violence; unsafe migration and trafficking; labor and sexual exploitation; and denial of health care. Despite having bound itself to human rights laws, the Thai government is failing to fulfill its obligations to Burmese women, with particularly devastating impacts for their well-being, including the risk of HIV/AIDS. Moreover, as our documentation shows, this failure to incorporate human rights concerns into its national response to the epidemic virtually guarantees that HIV/AIDS will continue to be a problem in Thailand.
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Health and human rights · Jan 2006
The Peruvian Truth Commission's mental health reparations: empowering survivors of political violence to impact public health policy.
The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), formed in 2001, turned national attention toward the serious mental health consequences of the country's 20-year internal armed conflict. The TRC prioritized reparations in mental health, using a legal justification that provided victims-survivors of the war with a rights-based framework for demanding that the public sector attend to their mental health needs. Since the majority of victims-survivors come from historically poor, rural, and marginalized populations and have tended to not exercise their right to health for a variety of social, economic, and cultural reasons, framing mental health in terms of rights helps to empower these people to impact the development of appropriate policies in mental health. The authors suggest that this process contributes directly to improving the mental health of this population.
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Health and human rights · Jan 2006
Case ReportsInvoking health and human rights to ensure access to legal abortion: the case of a nine-year-old girl from Nicaragua.
Human rights and public health advocates working to compel states to guarantee access to legal abortion services face obstacles. We describe the challenges faced by "Rosa", a nine-year old Nicaraguan girl, whose pregnancy following rape sparked international controversy. ⋯ The article analyzes the strengths, limitations, and complementarity of health and human rights approaches for achieving access to safe, legal services in restrictive contexts. The importance of strategic alliances and implications for future cases are considered.
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Health and human rights · Jan 2006
Evaluating asylum seekers/torture survivors in urban primary care: a collaborative approach at the Bronx Human Rights Clinic.
Primary care providers who evaluate torture survivors often lack formal training to identify and address their specific needs. We assessed 89 asylum seekers from 30 countries to evaluate the pattern, spectrum, and presentation of abuses and the outcomes of the medico-legal process of seeking asylum. ⋯ Persistent psychological symptoms were common; 40% had post-traumatic stress disorder. The high success rate of asylum approval (79%) in this sample highlights the need for physician witnesses trained in identification and documentation of torture, working in collaboration with human rights organizations.