Global Health and Human Rights are Made for Each Other

by Michael Keizer

Published June 29, 2009 @ 08:41AM PT

(photo credit: takomabibelot)

(Rudolf Virchow, the 18th-century advocate of health as a social rights issue.)

In my previous posting, I wrote about the negative impact health interventions can have on human rights. This time, I would like you to consider how the global health effort and other human rights can benefit from each other.

A terminal cancer patient cannot easily exercise their right to work (UDHR art. 23.1), nor can a comatose mother easily choose the kind of education for her child (UDHR art. 26.3). This is perhaps even clearer on the population level: e.g., a population ravaged by disease will not find it easy to take part in (or even have a) cultural life (ICESCR art. 15.1 sub a). Hence improving the health status of an individual or population will have positive effects on their ability to exercise other human rights as well.

It might even be clearer that human rights impact on health than the reverse - think of violations like torture or arbitrary detainment. However, the influence of human rights on health is much more pervasive: e.g., on first sight, the right to association might seem irrelevant to health, until one realizes the importance of NGOs for the global health effort. Perhaps a more obvious (but still often overlooked) example is the impact of discrimination of e.g. disabled persons on their health status.

In this context, it might be good to recall what I wrote earlier about Paul Farmer's ‘structural violence': social and economic inequities directly or indirectly determine who will benefit fully from human rights like health - and who doesn't. A good example from my adopted home country, Australia, is how earlier human-rights infractions have caused a significant lower health status for the aboriginal population.

The rise of this realization is often (and a bit lazily) placed with the first HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. However, one can make a convincing argument that this approach is in fact much older, and that parts of it were already present in the writing of 19^th-century health advocates like Virchow, Leubuscher, and Villermé - and even as early as the 18^th-century work of Neumann. In this view, the human-rights approach to health is nothing more than an attractive "repackaging" of older ideas about social determinants of health.

Be that as it may, it is clear that this approach has been very successful - more so than Villermé or Virchow ever were. Health work has benefited from the development of human rights in many ways: by their explicit recognition of health as a right; by empowering the most vulnerable and marginalized; as a conceptual framework for analysis and response; as a standard to which governments can be held accountable, and consequently as a powerful tool for advocacy; and by using the existing human rights monitoring mechanisms for the health effort.