Blogs

By Sara L.M. Davis and Allan Maleche Hands off our fingerprints! That was the message from Kenyan civil society activists who blocked the use of biometric data, such as fingerprints or iris scans, in a government study of HIV. This case study of…

By Fran Quigley Photo credit: Catherine Tomlinson Access to essential medicines is a well-established component of the human right to health, but it is a right that remains elusive for millions of people across the globe. The United Nations…

Rachel Hall-Clifford When I began working as a medical anthropologist on childhood illness in Guatemala over a decade ago, I wanted to explore what the right to health meant for communities targeted by global health initiatives and how local people…

Joseph J. Amon and Nina Sun The US State Department released its annual report on human rights on 20 April. The first report of the Trump administration garnered headlines because it stripped all references to reproductive rights, eliminating a…

Patrick Eba Many commentators in the 1980s dismissed the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter) as “a false dawn for the promotion and protection of human rights in Africa”.[1] This pessimism arose from the African Charter’s…

by Fifa Rahman and Fran Quigley In his 2018 State of the Union address US President Donald Trump issued yet another vow to address his country’s crisis in prescription drug pricing, where fast-climbing costs are causing one in four Americans to…

Benjamin Mason Meier, Rebekah Thomas, and Kent Buse UNAIDS World AIDS Day launch 2017 The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) is focusing its 2017 World AIDS Day campaign on the right to health. This groundbreaking campaign, My…

Fran Quigley It was at a street protest for access to medicines when Priti Krishtel and Tahir Amin realized that they needed to go beyond street protests. Krishtel and Amin were both young lawyers who had walked away from lucrative law firm jobs,…

Jason Hung Devised in 1950s, hukou is a residency registration system that controls internal rural-urban migration within China. Then in 1978 the Chinese Communist Party started a series of socioeconomic reforms, including the establishment of…

Joseph J. Amon When Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was elected as WHO Director-General earlier this year, there was a sense among people working on Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) that there may be new attention, and resources, for efforts at…