Making Health a Human Right: The World Health Organisation and the United Nations Programme on Human Rights and Scientific and Technological Developments

Abstract

This article explores the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in establishing global health governance through human rights, tracing WHO’s evolving participation in the United Nations’ (UN’s) Programme on Human Rights and Scientific and Technological Developments. From a fear of the risks of technology arising out of the 1968 International Conference on Human Rights, the UN pursued a policy agenda that framed medical science as a serious threat to the rights and freedoms of individuals. However, once WHO actively asserted a position that identified health as a human right, WHO’s emergence in rights-based policy discourse reframed science and technology positively in global health policy. With WHO employing the right to health as a source of positive obligations on states to realize the benefits of science and technology for the public’s health, this analytic narrative highlights a path through which human rights has come to frame global health.