Category: Viewpoints

Chris Beyrer Impunity: exemption from punishment or freedom from the injurious consequences of an action. A noun. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2019). There has perhaps always been a greater burden of unpunished human rights violations than punished ones. The newest mechanism for accountability for rights abuses, the International Criminal Court, has to date successfully prosecuted only one charge of the most grievous abuse, genocide, that of the case of the Srebrenica…

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Benjamin Mason Meier, Margherita Marianna Cinà, and Lawrence O. Gostin Institutions of global health governance are central to the advancement of health and human rights. Over the past 25 years, there has arisen an effort to formalize human rights implementation responsibilities across institutions of global governance, leading to a dramatic reframing in how international human rights law has been understood to influence the policies, programs, and practices of international organizations.…

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Damon Barrett, Julie Hannah, and Rick Lines The 25th anniversary of Health and Human Rights comes at an interesting time in international drug policy. Not long ago, references to human rights could be, and were, easily vetoed from draft UN drug policy resolutions. At best, human rights were included in declaratory preambles of omnibus resolutions, and largely forgotten in any substantive sense. Drug policy NGOs, for the most part, did…

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Lawrence O. Gostin, Hanna Huffstetler, and Benjamin Mason Meier The health and human rights movement has united the world to realize health-related human rights. Yet, the current age of populist nationalism has challenged long-held assumptions about the overarching importance of human rights and the rights-based imperative of global solidarity. It is necessary to look to the next generation of leaders to sustain (and reinvigorate) the commitment to universal rights in…

Continue reading “Human Rights Education Must Become Central to the Health Curriculum”

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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