Health and human rights
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Health and human rights · Jan 2010
International assistance and cooperation for access to essential medicines.
Access to essential medicines is a critical problem that plagues many developing countries. With a daunting number of domestic constraints - technologically, economically, and otherwise - developing countries are faced with a steep uphill battle to meet the human rights obligation of providing essential medicines immediately. To meet these challenges, the international human rights obligations of international assistance and cooperation can play a key role to help developing countries fulfill the need for access to essential medicines. This article seeks to highlight and expand upon the current understanding of international assistance and cooperation for access to essential medicines through a review of obligations identified in international human rights law and a synthesis of official guidance provided on the matter.
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Health and human rights · Jan 2009
Mental health and inequity: a human rights approach to inequality, discrimination, and mental disability.
Mental disability and mental health care have been neglected in the discourse around health, human rights, and equality. This is perplexing as mental disabilities are pervasive, affecting approximately 8% of the world population. Furthermore, the experience of persons with mental disability is one characterized by multiple interlinked levels of inequality and discrimination within society. ⋯ Such an approach also requires us to examine the multiple ways in which inequality and discrimination characterize the lives of persons with mental disabilities and to formulate a response based on a human rights framework. In this article, I examine issues of terminology, models of understanding mental disability, and the implications of international treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for our response to the inequalities and discrimination that exist within society--both within and outside the health care system. Finally, while acknowledging that health care professionals have a role to play as advocates for equality, non-discrimination, and justice, I argue that it is persons with mental disabilities themselves who have the right to exercise agency in their own lives and who, consequently, should be at the center of advocacy movements and the setting of the advocacy agenda.
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Health and human rights · Jan 2008
Health systems and the right to the highest attainable standard of health.
The right to the highest attainable standard of health should be the cornerstone of any consideration of health and human rights. The content of this fundamental human right is now sufficiently well understood to be applied in an operational, systematic, and sustained manner. At the heart of the right to the highest attainable standard of health lies an effective and integrated health system, encompassing medical care and the underlying determinants of health, which is responsive to national and local priorities and accessible to all. ⋯ But it is misconceived to regard human rights as yet another approach with the same status as the others. Like ethics, the right to the highest attainable standard of health is not optional--and, like ethics, it recurs throughout all other approaches. The right to the highest attainable standard of health is the only perspective that is both underpinned by universally recognized moral values and reinforced by legal obligations.
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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
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.