Person:

Marks, Stephen

This chapter begins by discussing the emergence of health in the corpus of international human rights. It covers health in the World Health Organization (WHO) constitution, the right to health in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), health in the United Nations human rights treaty system, and the right to health in the regional treaty system. It then turns to the scope of the right to health, which covers both specific elements of the health system (obligations) and the realization of other human rights that contribute to health (specific health-related human rights). The final section discusses the means and methods implementing the right to health.

This chapter examines the issue of access to medical products, vaccines, and medical technologies from the perspective of a human right predicated upon two other rights: the right to health and the right to benefit from scientific progress. In addition to discussing evolving international human rights standards, it addresses domestic implementation and litigation related to incentivizing research into and development of means through which to treat and prevent diseases that have a disproportionate burden in developing countries, as well as strategies aimed at improving universal access to medical products, vaccines, and medical technologies.

Human rights constitute a set of norms governing the treatment of individuals and groups by states and non-state actors on the basis of ethical principles regarding what society considers fundamental to a decent life. These norms are incorporated into national and international legal systems, which specify mechanisms and procedures to hold the duty-bearers accountable and provide redress for alleged victims of human rights violations. After a brief discussion of the use of human rights in ethical, legal, and advocacy discourse and some historical background of the concept of human rights, this essay will examine the tensions between human rights and state sovereignty, the challenges to the universality of human rights, the enumeration of rights recognized by the international community, and the means available to translate the high aspirations of human rights into practice.

The expansion of the corpus of international human rights to include the right to water and sanitation has implications both for the process of recognizing human rights and for future developments in the relationships between technology, engineering and human rights. Concerns with threats to human rights resulting from developments in science and technology were expressed in the early days of the United Nations (UN), along with the recognition of the ambitious human right of everyone "to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications." This comment explores the hypothesis that the emerging concepts most likely to follow recognition of the human right to water primarily involve issues of science and technology, such as access to medicines or clean and healthy environment. Many threats to human rights from advances in science, which were identified in the past as potential, have become real today, such as invasion of privacy from electronic recording, deprivation of health and livelihood as a result of climate change, or control over individual autonomy through advances in genetics and neuroscience. This comment concludes by urging greater engagement of scientists and engineers, in partnership with human rights specialists, in translating normative pronouncements into defining policy and planning interventions.

The prospects for including a human rights based approach in the post-2015 Development Agenda are dim if one considers the underlying reasons why the initial Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were essentially silent on human rights. In this paper I will begin by exploring the obstacles to inclusion of human rights in the MDGs resulting from differing perceptions of development theory and practice. Secondly, I will examine some promising and some disappointing efforts to mainstream human rights in the post-2015 development agenda through official governmental and unofficial non-governmental and academic efforts. The third part will address the specific recommendations that have been made and conclude by highlighting those that appear reasonable and feasible to ensure that the new sustainable development goals are at least human rights sensitive and at best human rights based.

This chapter addresses the challenge posed by poverty to the protection of human rights. Human rights define the entitlements considered necessary for a life of dignity in society, including the right to an adequate standard of living, that is, the right to be free from poverty. At this high level of abstraction, the elimination of poverty and realization of human rights are similar in that both clarify what needs to be done so that all human beings enjoy minimal standards of a decent existence. The context for this inquiry is the consensus regarding the imperative of poverty reduction and human rights realization, and the contested interpretations of the impact of globalization and financial crises on poverty and human rights. This context will be set out first, followed by a discussion of how international discourses on human rights and poverty diverge and, finally, how they converge.