BOOK REVIEW David Patterson Global Health Law and Policy: Ensuring Justice for a Healthier World, edited by Lawrence O. Gostin and Benjamin Mason Meier (Oxford University Press, 2024) Global Health Law and Policy: Ensuring Justice for a Healthier World is an up-to-date, comprehensive, and accessible overview of global health law, policy, and governance. The editors, Lawrence O. Gostin and Benjamin Mason Meier, have provided the reader with a sound foundation…
Listening is Believing: Can Oral History Catalyze Greater Investment in Health and Human Rights?
Summer Peet, Jonathan Cohen, Laura Ferguson, and Sofia Gruskin In 2020, just as COVID-19 was revealing the human rights underpinnings of a global pandemic, one of the world’s largest private philanthropic programs devoted to health and human rights—the Public Health Program of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations—was closing its doors. This untimely coincidence highlighted a need to document and share lessons learned from decades of philanthropic investment in rights-based health…
US Clinicians Face a Dual Loyalty Crisis over Reproductive Health Care
Ranit Mishori, Payal K. Shah, Karen Naimer, and Michele Heisler [a]s a provider, I am supposed to counsel my patients on risks and benefits, alternatives, and help them navigate through making a decision. And I can’t do that… because it’s not allowable and I can go to jail.[1] Since the 2022 US Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade, clinicians have been…
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Fighting the (Mis)fortunes in Global Health
BOOK REVIEW Rebecca Riddell When Misfortune Becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality, by Alicia Ely Yamin (Stanford University Press, July 2023) These are difficult days for hope in the struggle for health justice. A United Nations expert, condemning an “unrelenting war” on health systems in Gaza, declared this “the darkest time for the right to health in our lifetimes.”[1] Four years after the emergence of…
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Settler Colonialism and Health in Palestine: A Call to Action
Raquel Selcer and Sanjna L. Surya The World Health Organization (WHO) last week declared the situation in Gaza to be approaching “humanity’s darkest hour”.[1] Israel has killed over 19,000 Palestinians in Gaza to date, over 7,000 of whom are children, in what some human rights officials and scholars have called an unfolding case of genocide.[2] This staggering rate of human loss is virtually unprecedented in modern warfare.[3] The war has…
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Navigating Public Health in the Israel-Palestine Conflict: Charting a Path Forward
William C. Lieber, Faraan O. Rahim, Bhav Jain, Devesh Shah, and Mohammad Z. Sahloul In the wake of the devastating attack by Hamas on Israeli soil on October 7, which resulted in over 1,200 Israeli deaths and the capture of 240 hostages, the Israeli government pledged swift retaliation against Hamas. On October 9, Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, cutting off food, water, electricity, fuel, and medicine. Additionally, on…
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…
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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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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Scientific Awakening: Violation of Human Rights of Academic Scholars and Healthcare Professionals in Iran
Mahtab Jafari and Parya Saberi Is it the obligation of the scientific community to speak up against the violation of human rights of fellow scientists and healthcare professionals? We believe it is.[1] We see it as a moral imperative and the absolute responsibility of any scientist to amplify the voices of scientists who are subjected to human rights violations. A number of editorials and letters published by Iranian scholars outside…