Dainius Pūras I am taking the opportunity presented by this series of reflections on the right to health to comment on my experiences as the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, especially as I am now entering the final year of this mandate. Our understanding of the meaning of the right to health was greatly helped in the year 2000 by General Comment 14, and its resulting analytical…
Continue reading “Challenges in Promoting the Interdependence of all Human Rights”
Alicia Ely Yamin Dear Young and Future Leaders in Struggles for Health Rights and Social Justice: The world has changed tremendously in the almost 25 years since I had the privilege of studying under the late Dr. Jonathan Mann at what is now the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and to witness the birth of a movement for health and human rights. You may be inclined to dismiss…
Gillian MacNaughton Looking back over the past 25 years, the right to health has matured in healthy ways. It is deeper, broader and considerably more complex. From a narrow focus on freedoms, such as nondiscrimination and privacy, the right to health has grown to encompass a broad range of entitlements, including universal health care and the underlying or social determinants of health.1 From a siloed right of interest to a…
Continue reading “The Maturing Right to Health: Deeper, Broader and More Complex but Still Unequal”
Rajat Khosla Reflecting on the 25th anniversary of Health and Human Rights (HHRJ) is in a way a reflection on the history of health and human rights. It is an opportunity to pause and reflect on past and present challenges. On the one hand, human rights in health have become institutionalized with an array of norms and standards and professionalised with senior roles in key global institutions, and on the…
Leonard Rubenstein The Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes no reference to war except to assert that respect for human rights is a means of preventing it. The lack of attention is not surprising given that in the post-World War II period the conduct of war was the subject of the 1945 Nuremberg Declaration about war crimes and crimes against humanity, and intense debate in the lead-up to the re-drafting…
Continue reading “War, Political Conflict, and the Right to Health”
Sofia Gruskin When we launched the Health & Human Rights Journal 25 years ago it was a heady time for health and human rights conceptually, empirically, and politically. I had just moved to Boston to begin working with Jonathan Mann and Daniel Tarantola at the newly created FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. In those early years, we hosted two international conferences on health and human rights and began…
Audrey R. Chapman I first became involved with right to health issues around the time of the launching of the Health and Human Rights Journal when I became director of a human rights program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Having spent nearly 10 years in Africa, I gravitated toward economic and social rights and then the right to health naively believing the human rights rhetoric that…
Continue reading “The Right to Health: Then, Now and a Call to Arms”
Welcome to our new series, Viewpoints, which we have launched to celebrate the Health and Human Rights Journal 25th anniversary, and our new publishing partnership: The FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University and the Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University. The Journal was launched under the editorship of Jonathan Mann in 1994, the founder of the FXB Center and the founding Dean of the Dornsife School…
Continue reading “Viewpoints: Looking Back, Looking Forward”
