Vol 25/2, 2023, pp. 125-139 PDF Rossella De Falco, Timothy Fish Hodgson, Matt McConnell, and A. Kayum Ahmed Abstract Private actors’ involvement in health care financing, provision, and governance contributes to economic inequality. This paper provides an overview of emerging normative trends regarding private actors’ involvement in health care by reviewing and critically analyzing international and regional human rights standards on the right to the highest attainable standard of physical…
Economic Inequality and the Right to Health: On Neoliberalism, Corporatization, and Coloniality
Vol 25/2, 2023, pp. 105-110 PDF EDITORIAL Gillian MacNaughton and A. Kayum Ahmed The emergence of neoliberalism 50 years ago has led to a marked increase in economic inequality and an undermining of economic, social, and cultural rights. The papers in this special section examine the role of neoliberal policies in exacerbating economic inequality, while at the same time considering how these policies deliberately prevent efforts to progressively realize the…
Realizing the Right to Health: A Long and Winding Road
Vol 25/2, 2023, pp. 1-14 PDF EDITORIAL Joseph J. Amon Introduction Where are we, in this moment, in our efforts to realize a right to health for all? As I take on the role of editor-in-chief of Health and Human Rights Journal, this question preoccupies me. I began thinking about it while reflecting on the legacies of the editors who preceded me—Jonathan Mann, Sofia Gruskin, and Paul Farmer—towering figures, pioneering…
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Health Faculty Call for Ceasefire in Gaza and Centering Palestine in the Classroom
A. Kayum Ahmed, Bram Wispelwey, and Yara Asi In an open letter to President Biden more than 100 faculty from schools of public health and medical schools across the United States joined calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to attacks on hospitals. Signatories include Dr. Mary Bassett, director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, and Dr. Seema Yasmin, an Emmy Award-winning…
Occupation is a Public Health Crisis Too
Anurima Kumar and Meera Rothman In the face of the glaring humanitarian crisis in Palestine, the silence of American public health institutions has been deafening. After a month of relentlessly bombing Al-Shifa hospital (notably using American missiles that slice through flesh), Israeli troops entered and raided the hospital wards, killing and displacing people in need of immediate care.[1] The American Medical Association (AMA), widely recognized as the foremost medical lobbying…
Health and Human Rights Journal Announces Amon as Editor-in-Chief
Harvard University’s François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights and Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, co-publishers of the Health and Human Rights Journal, announced today the appointment of Drexel Professor Joseph Amon, PhD, MSPH, as the journal’s Editor-in-Chief. The Health and Human Rights Journal began publication at Harvard in 1994 under the editorship of Prof. Jonathan Mann, who subsequently became Dean of what would become the…
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UK AI Safety Summit will Impact Global Health: Time to Strengthen Rights-Based AI Governance
Sara (Meg) Davis The forthcoming high-level UK AI Safety Summit focuses on existential threats caused by the rapid growth and proliferation of AI systems. Health goals—for example, the promise of more rapid and accurate diagnosis and treatment—are often cited as an underlying rationale for the rapid growth of AI. But in practice, without stronger AI governance, the profound inequalities and human rights issues in global health risk being amplified. Experts,…
Human Rights and Medical Conferences: Against Conventional Wisdom
Jacob M. Appel The recent decision by the International Association of Bioethics (IAB) to hold its 17th annual World Congress of Bioethics (WCB) in Doha, Qatar, has been met with considerable backlash over the proposed host country’s record of human rights abuses. Five leading Dutch bioethicists led by Rieke van der Graaf raised concerns regarding Qatar’s long history of abusing migrant laborers, suppressing minority tribes, lack of freedom of expression,…
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UK Cost-of-Living Crisis and Food Banks: A Right to Health Critique
Sharifah Sekalala, Kevin Hearty, and Hadijah Namyalo-Ganafa Interspersed between headlines of multiple crises in the United Kingdom such as leaving the European Union, COVID-19, successive changes of government, the war in Ukraine, and public sector work strikes, has been a long-standing crisis around the cost of living. The cost-of-living crisis is about many things; high energy prices, high utility bills, unaffordable housing, but also fundamentally about increasing prices of food…
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An Explicit Right to Abortion is Needed in International Human Rights Law
Audrey Chapman Access to sexual and reproductive health care is a fundamental right that all states must respect, protect, and fulfil, and is articulated in regional and international treaties including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). But one year on from the US…
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