Jim Yong Kim
As Director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, I am delighted to welcome readers to the new series of the Center’s flagship journal. Health and Human Rights was launched under the FXB Center’s founding director, Jonathan Mann, in 1996. Since then, the journal has been critical to the Center’s vocation: providing intellectual leadership in the global effort to realize the right to health, in particular for children and other vulnerable groups.
Intellectual leadership in human rights, as Jonathan Mann understood, involves more than rigorous research and analysis — although these are indispensable. Leadership on the right to health must be informed by the knowledge that emerges in front-line contexts, where communities confront the consequences of rights failures, and where implementers work to deliver the services without which rights guarantees are empty promises. Jonathan Mann’s purpose in launching the journal was not only to bridge academic disciplines, including public health, medicine, law, and ethics, but to connect the FXB Center’s teaching, learning, and intellectual work more closely with front-line settings, where the real struggles over health and human rights take place.