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…
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,…
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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UN Expert Addresses Privacy and Health Rights Concerns in Digital Technology
Alexandrine Pirlot de Corbion and Timothy Wafula Digital technology and its benefits and risks to the right to health are the focus of the latest report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the Special Rapporteur, is presenting her thematic report “Digital innovation, technologies and the right to health” to the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday 22 June, 2023. We highlight four issues…
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Women’s Health Rights can Guide International Climate Litigation: KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland before the European Court of Human Rights
Hannah van Kolfschooten and Angela Hefti All over the world, individuals are taking governments to court for their role in climate change, or rather, their “climate inaction”. The 2022 Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation Policy Report shows that strategic litigation cases to enforce climate laws and policies have doubled since 2015. On 29 March 2023, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) heard its first…
It Is Time to Abolish the Death Penalty for People with Intellectual Disabilities
Gautam Gulati and Brendan D. Kelly On 5 October 2021, Ernest L. Johnson, a 61-year-old man, was executed in Missouri, United States. Johnson’s crime was heinous: in 1994 he killed three people in a convenience store. No words can describe the consequences of such an act: three lives lost, many more lives shattered, and psychological wounds that endure to this day. But Johnson had fetal alcohol syndrome and an…
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Breakthrough on Loss and Damage Funding at COP27: A Need to Incorporate Human Rights Principles
A. Karim Ahmed It is not entirely clear what finally broke the logjam on loss and damage funding at the COP27 meeting held in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt (November 6-18, 2022). Was it the threat made by European Union countries to walk away from the meeting or the isolation felt by the United States delegation in holding to their hard stance on loss and damage taken…
Power, Privacy, and the People at the AIDS 2022 Conference
Sara (Meg) Davis The International AIDS Conference is a biennial litmus test for the global HIV response: a moment to celebrate progress in research and practice, forge new connections and reconnect with allies. Human rights has long been a central topic, both on the formal program and in the Global Village where civil society gathers. This year at AIDS 2022 in Montreal, Canada, many of the human rights track sessions…
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Roe Overturned: Lessons from Latin America
Andrés Constantin and Maia Levy Daniel A few years ago, Belén ended up in jail after being admitted to a hospital in Argentina for suffering a miscarriage.[1] Within hours, she was surrounded by the police and accused of having induced an abortion, which was illegal. Belén spent 29 months in preventive detention and was sentenced to eight years in prison for aggravated homicide due to Argentina’s strict abortion laws at…
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