Health and Human Rights News
News to 27 February 2026
HHR: Best Paper 2025 focuses on mental health
Lisa Cosgrove’s paper, Addressing the Global Mental Health Crisis: How a Human Rights Approach Can Help End the Search for Pharmaceutical Magic Bullets, has been awarded the Health and Human Rights Best Paper 2025. Published in the special section on Institutional Corruption and human rights in mental health, December 2025, the paper argues that calls to end the “mental health crisis” and develop more effective psychotropics, are grounded in a neoliberal sensibility. Cosgrove presents solutions for reform that are embedded in a human rights framework.
See also:EDITORIAL Examining Institutional Corruption in Mental Health: A Key to Transformative Human Rights Approaches, Alicia Ely Yamin, Camila Gianella Malca, and Daniela Cepeda Cuadrado, Volume 27/2, Dec 2025
WHO: Presenting health as a benefit not a cost
The World Health Organization Executive Board will present a new strategy to the World Health Assembly in May, called the Economics of Health For All (EH4A). The WHO Watch Team at People’s Dispatch explains that the EH4A is common sense, but revolutionary–an “approach that insists healthy populations aren’t a byproduct of wealth: they are the very engine that produces it.” Health is not presented as a cost, but rather the best investment a country can make, which is asking countries ‘to redesign the economic order’.
See also: The Equity Effect of Universal Health Care, Anja Rudiger, Volume 25/2, Dec 2023
EDITORIAL: Economic Inequality and the Right to Health: On Neoliberalism, Corporatization, and Coloniality, Gillian MacNaughton and A. Kayum Ahmed, Volume 25/2, Dec 2023
UN Tax Convention avoids prickly issues
As negotiations for the future UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation continued this month, political and institutional questions remain on the table. The Center for Economic and Social Rights details the continuing uncertainties and tensions and note disputes over whether the Convention’s Conference of the Parties should have ‘concrete operationalizable mandates’, and to what degree it will have authority to hold states to account in taxing the super-rich or committing to sustainable development.
See also: FIGHT FOR RIGHTS: A Tax on the World’s Ultra-Rich to Fight Hunger and Disease, Eric A. Friedman and Lawrence O. Gostin, 20 May 2025
Türk calls for bold and radical responses
In his opening remarks to the 61st session of the Human Rights Council High Commissioner Volker Türk urged member states to be bold in defending human rights and denouncing violations of international law. He said, “A fierce competition for power, control and resources is playing out on the world stage at a rate and intensity unseen for the past 80 years.” In commending grassroots movements demanding rights and denouncing corruption, both domestically and internationally, he described human rights as an “anathema to supremacy: they are a direct challenge to those who seek and cling to power…That is what makes human rights radical, and that is what gives them force.”
See also: EDITORIAL: Accountability from Below, Paul Hunt and Anuj Kapilashrami, Vol 27/2, Dec 2025
Trump promotes oil production, mocks climate change, in state of the union speech
In his state of the union speech this week, US President Donald Trump praised his own efforts to increase oil and fossil fuel production, mocked former-President Biden’s “green new scam,” and did not mention climate change. “Despite the scientific consensus that the climate crisis is real, Trump has repeatedly called it a ‘hoax, while working to boost planet-heating fossil fuels,” noted the Guardian. Last week the Trump administration threatened to leave the International Energy Agency if it did not abandon its focus on climate change and rising global temperatures.
Trump removes mercury limits, endangering children
The Trump administration removed further air pollution restrictions, specifically those that limit mercury air emissions from coal plants. “While the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, has publicly praised the administration’s deregulation campaign, these destructive actions are a setback for maternal and child health—among the most sensitive developmental stages, affecting people throughout their lives,” writes Human Rights Watch.
WHO: Attacks on Ukraine’s health system up by 20%
This week marked four years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and attacks on the health system increased 20% in 2025, reports the World Health Organization. “Four years of war has created a serious health crisis in Ukraine…Mental health needs are staggering: 72% of people surveyed experienced anxiety or depression in the past year, yet only one in five sought help. Cardiovascular disease is surging, with one in four Ukrainians experiencing dangerously high blood pressure. And 8 out of 10 people report they can’t access the medicines they need.”
UN: Climate of impunity and possible ethnic cleansing in Gaza
Attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, widespread conditions of famine due to aid restrictions, and frequent displacement orders by Israeli forces between 1 November 2024 and 31 October 2025, amounted to serious violations of humanitarian and human rights law, and may amount to ethnic cleansing, according to a UN report. “Intensified attacks, the methodical destruction of entire neighbourhoods and the denial of humanitarian assistance appeared to aim at a permanent demographic shift in Gaza… together with forcible transfers, which appear to aim at a permanent displacement, raise concerns over ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.”
Israel’s assault had devastating impact on Gaza’s health system
Analysis of the first year of Israeli assault on Gaza following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack has found that hospital system functionality fell from 71.4% in October 2023, to consistently below 33% from December, reaching a low of 13.9% on 5 April 2024. “Hospitals are specifically protected under international law, and the findings of this study suggest a lack of protection of the hospital system as a whole during the first year,” the researchers from the FXB Center of Health and Human Rights reported.
Aid groups fight restrictions in Israeli High Court
More than 15 humanitarian aid groups have appealed to the Israeli High Court to overturn new laws barring them from entry to the Gaza Strip unless they provide staff names and biodata to Israeli authorities. Only 27 aid organizations have been approved by Israel to enter the Gaza Strip, and 37 are about to be suspended. “According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), if these groups cease operations in Gaza, one in three health facilities would immediately close, 20,000 patients requiring monthly specialized care would lose access to care, waterborne diseases and sanitation conditions would worsen, and there would be immediate and severe gaps in detecting and treating malnutrition,” warned Human Rights Watch.
UN Experts: Iran must account for the fates of protesters
Tlaleng Mofokeng, special rapporteur on the right to health, and fellow UN experts, are calling on Iranian authorities to halt all death sentences and executions related to recent nationwide demonstrations and to release information regarding the fate and whereabouts of those detained, disappeared, and missing. The experts said that the state’s crackdown on protesters and civilians has not ended, as telecommunications access remains shut off. “Iranian authorities have acknowledged 3,117 deaths and approximately 3,000 arrests, whereas human rights organisations estimate these figures to be in the tens of thousands…They include lawyers who sought to represent protesters, medical professionals who treated the wounded, journalists, and writers, artists and human rights defenders who supported the protests.”
Taliban’s systemic attack on women’s health rights
Gender-based discrimination has taken a widespread and severe toll on the right to health for women and girls in Afghanistan, finds a UN expert report released this week. The return of the Taliban has imposed new barriers that severely limit women’s and girls’ access to health systems and gender-oppressive policies have blocked access to healthcare, according to Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett. He notes that the withdrawal of international aid has also contributed to the deterioration of the health system.
Türk: Technology has a role in ending FGM
Across the world, technology has begun to play an essential role in the fight to eradicate the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM. UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk called for a commitment to closing the gendered digital divide, promoting safe and inclusive online spaces, and rejecting the growing gender backlash. For the fight to end FGM, he said digital platforms are already connecting survivors with human rights defenders, health professionals, and social workers, creating safe spaces to learn, to speak out, and to mobilize.
RSF’s campaign in El-Fasher points to genocide
Evidence detailed in a new report from the independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan finds that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed at least three acts of genocide against non-Arab communities in and around El-Fasher. “The body of evidence we collected—including the prolonged siege, starvation and denial of humanitarian assistance, followed by mass killings, rape, torture and enforced disappearance, systematic humiliation and perpetrators’ own declarations – leaves only one reasonable inference…The RSF acted with intent to destroy… the Zaghawa and Fur communities in El-Fasher.”
UNAIDS applauds Benin for HIV legislation
This month Benin adopted a new law focused on HIV prevention and care, replacing previous punitive and stigmatizing legislation. “The 2026 law is now aligned with international human rights standards and more specifically reaffirms the right to non-stigma and non-discrimination,” wrote UNAIDS. “It enhances privacy and data protection, ensures access to HIV care and prevention and services and recognizes key populations including sex workers, men who have sex with men, people who inject drugs, transgender people, migrants and prisoners among others.”
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