Health and Human Rights

11 Key excerpts on "Health and Human Rights"

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  Health Rights

  • Thomas Pogge, Michael J. Selgelid(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  This section begins with a discussion of the traditional dichotomy between the roles and functions of medicine and those of public health, which will help begin to frame the content of governmental obligations towards individuals and populations for health under international human rights law. Health will then be placed in the broader context of human development in order to underscore the relevance of a broad array of governmental obligations, well beyond the health sector, that may impact on health. The four strategic directions to health development mentioned above will then be presented as an approach relevant to the development of both a Health and Human Rights analysis and monitoring and accountability. Finally, a new grouping of these issues will be proposed as an entry point into their analysis from a human rights perspective, leading to a pathway for action.

  Medicine, Public Health, and Human Rights

  Health as it connects to human rights analysis and implementation concerns two related but different disciplines: medicine and public health. Historically the territorial boundaries of medicine and public health reflected not only professional interest and skill, but also the environments within which these skills were practised: homes, clinics, hospitals, and clinical laboratories on the one hand; institutes, public health laboratories, offices, and field projects on the other (Detels et al. 1997). Recently, the apparent differences between the two professions—the first primarily understood to focus on the health of individuals, the second on the health of populations—have profoundly impacted the ways in which the relationship between Health and Human Rights has been understood by different actors. From a rights perspective, this ancient division resulted in the assumption that, of the two, medicine was more concerned with the health and rights of the individual (for example, in creating conditions enabling a particular individual to access care), while the primary focus of public health was the protection of collective interests, even at the cost of arbitrarily restricting individual rights (Mann 1997b). For example, coercion and restrictions of rights had been critical to traditional smallpox eradication efforts (Fenner et al. 1988). Yet as the human rights approach has made increasingly clear, this stark differentiation between medicine and public health is no longer fully relevant either to human rights or to health. Although they apply different methods of work, both medicine and public health seek to ensure every person’s right to achieve the highest attainable standard of health, and both have a strong focus on the individual. Medicine is more concerned with analysing, diagnosing, and treating disease, as well as preventing ill health in individuals through such methods as immunization, appropriate diet, or prophylactic therapies. Public health seeks to address health and ill health by focusing on individual and collective determinants, be they behavioural, social, economic, or other contextual factors.

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  Geographies of Care

  Space, Place and the Voluntary Sector

  • Christine Milligan(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  2    Geographical Perspectives on Health Introduction

  As care has moved from institutional to community-based sites of delivery, concern has focused not only on the relocation of the locus of care, but also on the new sets of actors and agencies involved with its planning and provision. Attention is drawn to the ways in which decisions are made and how the social processes of care reform operate in particular places. The relationship between healthcare and the means through which social, cultural, political and economic influences alter the experience of health and illness across space and within places has been of particular interest to medical geographers in recent years.

  The study upon which this book is based builds on work that has emerged from several strands of contemporary geographical thinking. Such work maintains that for a clearer understanding of how and why specific patterns of health and healthcare emerge in particular places at particular times, there is a need to extend the focus of medical geography to incorporate a wider view of health and healthcare. These broadly embody the recognition of a need to move away from bio-medical approaches to the geographical analysis of health issues, to incorporate social models of health and healthcare. Such approaches also highlight the potential benefit of integrating multi-disciplinary perspectives to geographical analyses, and the need to understand how wider contextual factors impact on experiences of health and healthcare. To understand why these issues are of importance here, this chapter gives a brief history of the development of medical geographical thinking, identifying some of the main elements that have informed the study. In doing so, I discuss some of the main ‘traditional’ theoretical and epistemological positions through which aspects of health and illness have been examined within medical geography, and how development in thought across the discipline as a whole has become manifest in terms of “contemporary’ perspectives in geographies of health and healthcare.

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  A Companion to Health and Medical Geography

  • Tim Brown, Sara McLafferty, Graham Moon(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Importantly, such concern invites critical reflection on key ethical and moral questions regarding the ways in which certain bodies are normalized and others stigmatized, whether because of their shape, size, or appearance (e.g. the fat or obese INTRODUCTION TO HEALTH AND MEDICAL GEOGRAPHY 7 body) or because of the social and cultural values associated with the acquisition of specific types of disease (e.g. tuberculosis or syphilis). Though the questions raised by Craddock and Brown are, in some ways, quite distinct from those that we encounter in the part on public health and health inequalities, they do share in common an ongoing interest with the issues of equity and social justice, which are regarded as so important by Kearns and Collins. Opening with an extensive review of the association between health geography and public health (Curtis, Riva, and Rosenberg), this part goes on to examine a range of topics: “migration” (Boyle), “health inequalities” (Kulkarni and Subramanian), “neighborhoods and health” (Ellaway and McIntyre), “environmen- tal risk” (Jerrett with Gale and Kontgis) and “environmental risk perception and neighborhood response” (Elliot), “health behaviors” (Twigg and Cooper), and finally “governance, risk, and health” (Brown and Burges Watson). Though diverse, empirically and in some cases epistemologically, this collection of chapters reflects the scope and scale of geographers’ engagement with public health issues. As Curtis et al. reveal, this engagement, like much else within the sub-discipline, has long roots and could, if we were so minded, be linked to the work of the Victorian sani- tary reformers or even to Hippocrates’ On Airs, Water and Places. The connection here lies in a shared concern with the “environment” or, more precisely, with the idea that diseases, whether infectious or chronic, are a product not only of a person’ s behavior but also of the interaction of people with their environments.

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  Public Health

  Local and Global Perspectives

  • Pranee Liamputtong(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  These kids are not afraid of anything, they are very articulate’ (Educator, quoted in Soul City, 2005, p. 36). Questions 1 Watch the video on the provision of peer support and legal advice to sex workers in South Africa at http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/videos/south-africa-sex- workers-arm-themselves-law. 2 What are the specific rights involved in the work demonstrated here and in the Soul Buddyz example discussed above? 3 How do you think this work will have an impact more widely on health and health equity in South African society? 164 Part 2 Determinants of health Summary This chapter has discussed salient issues pertaining to human rights and health. These are summarised below. Human rights and the various global, regional and national systems that exist to support their achievement The first section of this chapter examined the human rights contained in the UDHR and associated covenants and conventions. It discussed universality and other key features of human rights, and then presented an overview of the regional and national systems that work alongside the global system. The ways in which human rights are important in public health Human rights are of great importance in public health practice for a number of different reasons. First, there are extensive and close links between specific human rights and the social determinants of health. Second, they provide a very powerful basis for public health advocacy; rights-based approaches have proved extremely effect in supporting the development of public health practice and policy. Finally, human rights are of importance to public health practitioners as one of the reasons rights can legitimately be restricted is in order to protect the health of the public.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies

  • Susan J Smith, Rachel Pain, Sallie A Marston, John Paul Jones III, Susan J Smith, Rachel Pain, Sallie A Marston, John Paul Jones III(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Central to the analysis is the dialectical relationship between geographies and human rights. In this approach, geogra-phy is more than just a ‘backdrop’ to events of human society. Rather, places and spaces influence social practices and ideas, as social movements and organizations transform places and spaces. The discussion that follows is organized into three parts. The first provides a geneal-ogy of human rights. I locate the most sig-nificant historical precedents within centuries of social history concerning the laws of war and international law, and the nineteenth-century development of international human-itarian law. My purpose here is to highlight that acts of violence are in no way self-evidently ‘abuses,’ but that the interpretation of violence as either an act of war or a human rights abuse is variably situated throughout time and space, constructed and always con-tentious. The second part focuses on the post-Second World War period as the key moment in the transformation of developments in law and society (concerning power and rights) into the discursive field of human rights, with associated material consequences. This sec-tion focuses on the proliferation of human rights social movements and organizations. The third part discusses power-relations between and among social movement actors, national governments and international insti-tutions, using the International Criminal Court (ICC) as an example. In this discus-sion, the ICC and other human rights instru-ments (conventions, organizations, social movements, etc.) are understood less as examples of a ‘progressive’ development of human rights, than portals through which to view the nexus of power/knowledge that pro-duces particular ideas and practices of human rights. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the uneven development of human rights, and future directions in geographic theory.

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  Health and Human Rights

  • Thérèse Murphy(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The upshot is that for human rights legal method, Health and Human Rights is a mercurial mix. Thus, we will need to see it in its totality but also to understand the particularities. International human rights law-making, for instance, is not identical to decision-making by constitutional courts, and constitutional courts are not identical to one another either. In similar vein, NGOs may 59 For recent assessments see Landau, ‘The Reality of Social Rights Enforcement’ (ibid); AE Yamin, O Parra-Verra and C Gianella, ‘Judicial Protection of the Right to Health: An Elusive Promise?’ in Yamin and Gloppen (eds) (n 15); KG Young and J Lemaitre, ‘The Comparative Fortunes of the Right to Health: Two Tales of Justiciability in Colombia and South Africa’ (2013) 26 Harvard Human Rights Journal 801. The Right to Health and other Health and Health-Related Rights 39 be linked nationally and internationally more than in the past, but NGO practices vis-à-vis law are certainly not identical. The same can be said of other notable actors, including national human rights institutions. The next key point to make is that once we draw down to the right to health, what we find is that sometimes recognition of this right is explicit; elsewhere it emerges from other rights—the right to life, for instance, or the right not to be subject to cruel or inhuman treatment, or the prohibition on arbitrary detention. 60 In places it is the right of access to health care rather than the right to health that is recognised or implied. In places, too, men-tion is made of particular forms of health care (emergency treatment, for instance) or particular groups (the right of, say, every child to basic health care services 61 ). Equally, in places health rights are judicially enforceable; elsewhere they appear as aspirational guarantees. Where they are enforce-able, almost all of them appear alongside modes by which it is legitimate to impose limits upon them.

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  Global Health, Human Rights, and the Challenge of Neoliberal Policies

  • Audrey R. Chapman(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Lancet-University of Oslo Commission on Global Governance for Health observes that “Nation states are responsible for respecting, protecting, and fulfilling their populations’ right to health, but with globalization many important determinants of health lie beyond any single government’s con- trol and are now inherently global” (Ottersen et al. 2014). Moreover, it is often difficult for states to engage in policy-making on health protection or human rights matters without taking into account how it will affect their economic competitiveness, attractiveness to foreign investors, implemen- tation of international trading agreements, and in the case of some coun- tries, possibilities for negotiating new loans with the World Bank and the This chapter builds on several of my earlier articles on health, human rights and globaliza- tion: Audrey R. Chapman (2009) “Globalization, Human Rights, and the Social Determinants of Health,” Bioethics 23: 97–111; Ted Schrecker, Audrey R. Chapman, Ronald Labonté, and Robert De Vogli, (2010) “Advancing health equity in the global marketplace: How human rights can help,” Social Science & Medicine 71: 1520–1526; Audrey R. Chapman and Salil D. Benegal (2013) “Globalization and the Right to Health,” in Lance Minkler, ed., The Status of Economic and Social Rights: A Global Overview, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 61–85. Health, Human Rights and Neoliberal Policies 154 International Monetary Fund. The manner in which the 2007 U.S. finan- cial crisis precipitated the global economic crisis, its impact on the econ- omies of Europe, and the health systems toll of the austerity policies that several of the countries, particularly Greece, were required to adopt as a condition for needed loans show that even developed countries cannot escape the health effects of global trends (Karanikolas et al. 2013).

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  Geographies and Moralities

  International Perspectives on Development, Justice and Place

  • Roger Lee, David M. Smith, Roger Lee, David M. Smith(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Human rights are often taken to be universal, but Rex Honey (Chapter 8) explains that the rights which actually exist in international and domestic agreements are socially constructed. It is not the rights themselves that are permanent features of life, but cultural struggles involving conflict over what constitutes a just society. Rights actually recognized can change over time, as they do from place to place. Nigeria provides an illustration of cultural struggles over human rights, among population groups within the country and in relation to external standards, demonstrating the significance of geographical scale to moral geographies.

  The other three chapters address rights to land. Avery Kolers (Chapter 9) is concerned with ‘territorial justice’ in the sense of the just distribution of territory. Overcoming what he terms the ‘Anglo-American ethnogeography’, which views land as merely a passive resource to be allocated by market forces, leads to recognition of the kind of broader claims to territory which should be taken seriously in the resolution of disputes. Shlomo Hasson (Chapter 10) describes a particularly demanding case of conflict with a territorial basis, in the city of Jerusalem, not only between Jews and Palestinian Arabs but also between Jews of different religious orientation. He argues for an ethical approach which avoids absolute winners and losers, in favour of recognition of the rights of both sides. Brij Maharaj (Chapter 11) turns to reparation as an aspect of social justice, raising issues of rights in relation to dispossession of land in South Africa under apartheid. He examines the policies and mechanisms developed to address land reform and restitution, as part of a process of societal healing.

  The very question of human rights, let alone their realization in thought and practice and the establishment of institutions devoted to their implementation, is far from unproblematic in the contemporary world. The notion of human rights reminds us in the most direct fashion that human life is social and that such rights are socially constructed – and, in part at least, socially structured in terms of what might be possible in any context. Here morality and ethics are very evident; their inherent spatiality is clear and their uneven and dynamic geography is all too apparent.

  REFERENCES

  Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City

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  Geographies of Health, Disease and Well-being

  Recent Advances in Theory and Method

  • Mei-Po Kwan(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Geographies of Health, Disease, and Well-being Mei-Po Kwan Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315541280-1

  In the past two decades or so, geographers and researchers in cognate disciplines have significantly advanced our understanding of the geographies of health, disease, and well-being in different areas of the world (e.g., Gatrell and Elliott 2009 ; Brown, McLafferty and Moon 2010; Meade and Emch 2010 ; Pearce and Witten 2010 ). Various theoretical perspectives and geographic methods have been applied to study health issues (e.g., Kearns 1993 ; Dorn and Laws 1994 ; Elliott et al. 2000 ; Andrews and Evans 2008 ; Cromley and McLafferty 2011 ). Importantly, health scholars have re-asserted the roles of environment, place, context, and neighborhood as significant influences on health behaviors and outcomes (e.g., Jones and Moon 1993 ; Diez Roux 1998 , 2001 ; Curtis and Jones 1998 ; Macintyre, Ellaway, and Cummins 2002 ; Kawachi and Berkman 2003 ; McLafferty 2008 ; Nemeth et al. 2012 ). It is now widely recognized that geographic variations in health, disease, and well-being cannot be explained exclusively in terms of the characteristics of individuals, as specific characteristics of place or neighborhoods (e.g., collective efficacy) also exert significant influence on health.

  The fourth annual special issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers

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  Global Governance and Public Health

  Obstacles and Opportunities

  • Geoffrey B. Cockerham(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

    (Publisher)

  An important issue in implementing human rights as a practice has to do with its relationship with economic development and growth. In terms of a potential conflict between the two, on one hand, it could be argued that significant implementation of human rights, especially economic and social, are too idealistic and would require impractical economic policies with possibly excessive government regulation of the market that may stifle economic growth. On the other hand, it could also be argued that prioritizing market interests over human rights is not only unethical but morally unjust. A study by the World Bank (2012) found that although a tension exists between human rights and economics, they are, for the most part, complementary. Included in the number of ways they may complement each other are the

  following: (1) human rights may help frame economic development in such a manner to improve equity in economic development and lead to greater economic growth, (2) human rights may be an effective means to reduce poverty, and (3) human rights may help promote a more educated and inclusive citizenry that could deter or constrain state corruption and its related economic costs.

  A right to health certainly has benefits for economic development. A state with a population that is relatively free from the burdens of infectious and non-communicable diseases has the potential to be much more economically productive than a state with an unhealthy population. A healthy population also significantly reduces the financial burden of health care costs both on the individuals and the government. Although a right to health and economics has similar tensions as human rights, more generally, and economics, there is also great potential for these goals to mutually benefit each other.

  HIV/AIDS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

  As discussed in chapter 4, HIV/AIDS is a relatively new disease that was first discovered in the United States during the early 1980s. The HIV/AIDS pandemic proved to be a critical step in promoting a norm of health as a human right. While this pandemic occurred decades after the UDHR and a few years before ICESCR went into force, the right to health was still more of an idea than an enforceable right prior to the outbreak. HIV/AIDS brought health forward as an issue in political and civil rights as well as in economic and social rights. In terms of political and civil rights, one significant problem was discrimination. As carriers of a potentially deadly virus with no known cure, people with HIV faced the prospects of possible job loss, segregated housing, and isolation due to their condition. Additionally, prospects for discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS were exacerbated as the condition became associated with homosexuals, intravenous drug users, and prostitutes, groups that were not held in high esteem by much of society. In the early 1980s, HIV/ AIDS was often associated with a promiscuous gay lifestyle, which brought some moral condemnation to individuals who had the disease (Wolff 2012). As a result, carriers of the HIV virus faced an even greater social stigma than persons suffering from other infectious diseases. The economic and social issues involved the right to health, specifically the right to high-quality treatment for the HIV/AIDS virus. Advancements in research during the 1990s made HIV a much easier disease to treat. These treatments, however, were fairly expensive, creating a potential financial obstacle for those that needed it.

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  Health Geographies

  A Critical Introduction

  • Tim Brown, Gavin J. Andrews, Steven Cummins, Beth Greenhough, Daniel Lewis, Andrew Power(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Following some initial scepticism (e.g. Mayer and Meade 1994), as well as comple- mentary advice (Dorn and Laws 1994) and further explanation (Kearns 1994), understand- ing has since developed in geography that health and health care are deeply affected by places and the ways in which places are reacted to, felt and represented. It is to this wider scholarship that we now turn. Social constructions of health and place At one level, health care settings are argued to possess basic agency (for example, hospitals are settings that provide access to institutional medicine; community clinics provide access to primary health care and so on). Underlying this basic agency, however, are far more inti- mate processes that are recognised to be at play whereby ‘people make places’ and ‘places make people’. Armed with such ideas of place, a new generation of health geographers have sought to understand how place plays a central role in a variety of processes that impact on health and health care. One longstanding approach has been, and continues to be, to develop qualitative methods to observe in depth the health and illness lives of individuals and groups and to unlock the social and political structures imposed upon them and their experiences and agency within these (Gesler and Kearns 2002). Research in this vein ini- tially drew on the humanistic tradition and especially phenomenological accounts of place produced by geographers such as Edward Relph (1976) and Yi‐Fu Tuan (1976, 1979). As Wilbert Gesler and Robin Kearns note, humanistic approaches aim to ‘understand personal experiences and feeling and how people attach meaning to their surroundings’ (2002, p. 23). In this understanding, places are recognised to evoke a broad range of emotions and feelings that might shape a person’s health‐related experiences, both positively and nega- tively.

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