Category: Blog

During a June 1 health conference held in Norway, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged their countries’ aid  to a new initiative, “Saving Mothers, Giving Life,” which supports maternal health and aims “to improve the health of mothers and their babies in developing countries” by ensuring proper medical supplies and support during the birthing process and during the first 24 hours after birth.…

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Regulating Corporate Human Rights Violations Surya Deva Routledge (January 2012) ISBN 9780415668217 296 pages $145 Surya Deva’s new book on the humanization of business sets out to address three crucial and timely questions: Why companies and corporations have human rights responsibilities, what the scope of these responsibilities is, and how businesses, particularly multinational corporations, should be held accountable for human rights violations. The author opens with a study of the…

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Solomon Benatar and Gillian Brock Cambridge University Press, 2011 ISBN 9780521146777 350 pages $62 Benatar and Brock explore the obligations and challenges surrounding the improvement of global health in their new textbook, Global Health and Global Health Ethics. The editors posit that a comprehensive understanding of ethical issues concerning health is necessary for the promotion of sustainable and healthy living conditions, both locally and globally. Beginning with an overview of…

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Gunilla Backman, ed. Studentlitteratur, 2012 ISBN 9789144067803 368 pages $50 The Right to Health, edited by Gunilla Backman, expounds on the central theme that a functioning, accessible, and non-discriminatory health system is necessary for the realization of the right to health. The student guide illuminates the various disciplines involved in the practical applications of this concept, including the fields of health, human rights, law and ethics. Based on Backman’s law…

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Child protection network ECPAT International recently released a report stating that countries around the globe are falling far short of efforts necessary to stop child sex trafficking. ECPAT evaluated and rated 42 countries for their efforts in fighting child sex slavery, concluding that most countries are “failing to sufficiently criminalize the trafficking of children for sex.” Part of the problem lies in the criminalization of the young victims, rather than…

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By Rachel Kelley and Charlotte Greenbaum Reproductive health care funding has captured the American limelight in recent months. Whether responding to health care legislation or nonprofit philanthropies’ funding decisions, advocates across the country have defended the essential role of reproductive health care services to women’s and families’ wellbeing. As these conversations continue in the context of American politics, funding for reproductive health care remains in jeopardy not only in the…

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By Angela Duger Health and human rights professionals have long considered food and nutrition to be underlying determinants of health, but the focus has largely been on undernutrition. That focus is now changing. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 1.5 billion people are overweight or obese, and that now, for the first time in history, there are more overweight than underweight adults in the world. Obesity is linked to…

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Jonathan Wolff W. W. Norton & Company, 2012 ISBN 978-0393063356 208 pages $23.95 In The Human Right to Health, Jonathan Wolff explores all angles of the philosophical dilemma at the heart of establishing a human right to health: “On the one hand, the reasons for asserting a human right to health seem overwhelming. On the other, a universal human right to health seems impossible to satisfy in the current conditions…

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Chinese authorities hold periodic sweeps to detain sex workers, drug users, and other ‘social undesirables’ en masse in advance of national holidays and major government conferences. Sex workers, including feminist activist Ye Haiyan (also known as Hooligan Sparrow) are increasingly vocal in raising concerns about the effects of these raids, highlighting the hardships faced by the lowest-paid sex workers. The following is an analysis of recent police crackdowns against sex…

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Kony 2012, the much-discussed short film about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, has received more than 100 million views in one week, making it the most viral video of all time. The film, created by Jason Russell and released by American charity Invisible Children, aims to increase awareness of Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), responsible for mass atrocities in Uganda since 1987, including wide-scale abduction of children for sexual…

Continue reading “Kony 2012: Encouraging social change or oversimplifying a crisis?”