NEW HHRJ SERIES: Calling for blogs on SDGs, Accountability, and the Right to Health

Robust accountability processes and mechanisms are an essential component of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In our recent SDG SERIES, contributors repeatedly called for human rights to underpin these processes and mechanisms. In response, the Health and Human Rights Journal is now calling for contributions for a new series of blogs on “SDGs, Accountability, and the Right to Health.” Contributions may explore practical and procedural interpretations arising from an…

Mary Robinson Introduces the COP21 SERIES: Climate change, COP21, and the right to health

Introduction by Mary Robinson I am delighted to welcome and launch this Health and Human Rights Journal series on climate change, COP21 and the right to health. The initiative is timely; on Monday October 19, 2015, climate negotiators will reconvene in Bonn, Germany, for the final five days of negotiations before the Conference of Parties (COP21) begins in Paris on November 30. This is an incredibly important year; 2015 could…

Listening is Believing: Can Oral History Catalyze Greater Investment in Health and Human Rights?

Summer Peet, Jonathan Cohen, Laura Ferguson, and Sofia Gruskin In 2020, just as COVID-19 was revealing the human rights underpinnings of a global pandemic, one of the world’s largest private philanthropic programs devoted to health and human rights—the Public Health Program of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations—was closing its doors. This untimely coincidence highlighted a need to document and share lessons learned from decades of philanthropic investment in rights-based health…

Are Rights-Based Services Important? An Adolescent PrEP Demonstration Project in Brazil

Laura Ferguson, Alexandre Grangeiro, Ana Alexandra Natividad, Paula Massa, Ayra Rodrigues, Dulce Ferraz, and Eliana Miura Zucchi Abstract In this study, we systematically examined the importance of human rights standards and principles for rights-based pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) provision for marginalized adolescents. Nested within a demonstration study of PrEP provision to adolescent men who have sex with men, travestis, and transgender women, we carried out interviews in São Paulo, Brazil with…

US Clinicians Face a Dual Loyalty Crisis over Reproductive Health Care

Ranit Mishori, Payal K. Shah, Karen Naimer, and Michele Heisler  [a]s a provider, I am supposed to counsel my patients on risks and benefits, alternatives, and help them navigate through making a decision. And I can’t do that… because it’s not allowable and I can go to jail.[1] Since the 2022 US Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade, clinicians have been…

Fighting the (Mis)fortunes in Global Health

BOOK REVIEW Rebecca Riddell When Misfortune Becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality, by Alicia Ely Yamin (Stanford University Press, July 2023) These are difficult days for hope in the struggle for health justice. A United Nations expert, condemning an “unrelenting war” on health systems in Gaza, declared this “the darkest time for the right to health in our lifetimes.”[1] Four years after the emergence of…

Right to Shelter Needed in California

Holly Wertman New York and California are states of deep contradiction, both housing some of the nation’s most wealthy and also a sizeable proportion of the poorest. According to recent counts, California and New York have the largest homeless populations in the United States with 161,548 and 91,271 people respectively. The combined total represents more than 40% of the country’s entire homeless population, concentrated in Los Angeles (LA) and New…

Regulating Health Apps to Comply with Health Rights

Lyla Latif Digital health apps can play a crucial role in fulfilling core components of the right to health: availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality (AAAQ) of health services. Their use in the progressive realization of health rights could be significant in regions where resources are scarce, especially the Global South where the gaps in healthcare access and quality are acute. Innovations such as telemedicine and mobile health apps are examples…

Improving Global Health Governance in Armed Conflicts: Lessons from COVID-19

Beier Nelson, Lucy Tu, and Fatima Cody Stanford As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, the global community is confronted with a different type of outbreak—not of disease, but armed conflict. According to the United Nations (UN), we are currently witnessing the highest number of violent conflicts since World War II. Global health governance systems must have compliance from the international community to support the well-being of populations caught…

Settler Colonialism and Health in Palestine: A Call to Action

Raquel Selcer and Sanjna L. Surya The World Health Organization (WHO) last week declared the situation in Gaza to be approaching “humanity’s darkest hour”.[1] Israel has killed over 19,000 Palestinians in Gaza to date, over 7,000 of whom are children, in what some human rights officials and scholars have called an unfolding case of genocide.[2] This staggering rate of human loss is virtually unprecedented in modern warfare.[3] The war has…

Navigating Public Health in the Israel-Palestine Conflict: Charting a Path Forward

William C. Lieber, Faraan O. Rahim, Bhav Jain, Devesh Shah, and Mohammad Z. Sahloul In the wake of the devastating attack by Hamas on Israeli soil on October 7, which resulted in over 1,200 Israeli deaths and the capture of 240 hostages, the Israeli government pledged swift retaliation against Hamas. On October 9, Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, cutting off food, water, electricity, fuel, and medicine. Additionally, on…

UK Public Health Registrars Write Open Letter Calling for a Ceasefire in Gaza

As of 7 December 2023, the World Health Organization reports that 17,487 Palestinians have been killed in more than two months of bombardment on Gaza, with a large proportion of them children. The situation is dire, and as Public Health professionals we are extremely concerned at the toll this is having on Gaza’s population. Infrastructure to support public health is on its knees. Hospitals, clinics, places of worship, schools, bakeries,…