Health and Human Rights最新文献

In recent years there has been a sustained rise in the number of international migrants, and scholarship and practice have increasingly focused on the relationship between health and migration. However, the entitlement to state-subsidized services for migrants with precarious or irregular legal status, often fleeing distressing living conditions, is typically limited to emergency lifesaving health treatment, with nonstate programs attempting to complement this constrained approach. This paper asks whether a primary health care (PHC) approach could serve as a blueprint for institutional priority-setting and for the realization of human rights obligations to help states meet their core international commitments regarding migrant health rights. I look at the multi-actor response in Colombia-where almost three million Venezuelans have sought to settle and many more have transited during the last nine years-as a case study to explore the possibility of a meaningful PHC-oriented right to health in the migration context. Using human rights law standards and commentaries, I suggest that, with some qualifications, this approach holds promise.

In her 2023 report to the United Nations Human Rights Council on digital innovation, technology, and the right to health, the Special Rapporteur on the right to health underscored the positive impact of the digital transformation on young people, but also noted serious concerns, calling for greater efforts to consult and engage with youth and civil society. In our study, early-career researchers from Bangladesh and Colombia collaborated within a broader international research and advocacy project to investigate how diverse young adults experience digital health and to invite their recommendations and collaborative advocacy. Researchers held focus group discussions and interviews with young adults aged 18-30 (in Bangladesh, predominantly men; in Colombia, people living with HIV, gay men, and transgender women). In both countries, young adults said the digital turn had transformed their access to sexual and reproductive health and HIV information, highlighting both the positive role of young social media influencers and the harms caused by misinformation, lack of confidentiality, and widespread stigma. They called for greater government efforts to develop digital health, including through social media platforms. We find that transnational collaborations like this one offer the potential to generate actionable insights and inform the development of rights-based digital governance.

The social determinants of health and international human rights law share many overlapping concerns and goals in promoting human well-being. However, so far they have been developing largely in silos, resulting in calls for greater interdisciplinary collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the social determinants of health-specifically mental health-can fit within international human rights law conceptually and practically. I argue that the social determinants of mental health and international human rights law are mutually reinforcing. Both are necessary to realize the right to the highest attainable standard of health and its incorporation into domestic law and policy. International human rights law provides an indispensable universal and legally binding framework to realize both the right to health and the social determinants. Likewise, the social determinants enrich and expand international human rights law and challenge it to go further in responding to inequality, power imbalances, and the lifelong impact of adverse childhood experiences (especially in light of the early onset of mental ill-health). I use housing and employment as examples of how to deepen this conceptual and practical relationship.

Deploying legal analysis and a small-scale qualitative dataset, this paper considers the right to health of asylum seekers, as a subgroup of distress migrants, in Greece in the years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic and thereafter. The public health care system in Greece is operating under significant constraints stemming from austerity policies. We analyze the legal entitlements of asylum seekers as found in Greek and international law and confirm a significant gap between the right to health in theory and the right to health in practice. While some administrative matters have improved, in general, widespread human rights failures to provide the right to health for vulnerable asylum seekers arriving in Greece continue. In particular, shortcomings in the health care system's capacity and structure, as well as poor arrangements to secure the underlying conditions for good health, affect the practical realization of the right to health of asylum seekers, many of whom have complex health needs.

To add to the limited evidence on forensic medical and psychological evaluations of children experiencing distress migration and seeking asylum in the United States, this paper describes the sociodemographic characteristics, nature of human rights violations, and guardianship status of the children served by the Human Rights Clinic of Miami from 2010 to 2021. Through a retrospective study of affidavits, we identified trends among sociodemographic characteristics and types of human rights violations and used bivariate analysis to determine factors associated with guardianship. Children constituted 17% of all evaluations conducted during this period. Approximately half were male, and two-thirds were aged 15-17 years. Honduras was the most common country of origin, and physical violence was the most reported human rights abuse, followed by gang violence. Most children reported being detained at the United States-Mexico border. Only a third had a guardian present during the evaluation, with guardianship significantly more likely for younger children. This study provides insight into the health needs of children affected by distress migration. It underscores how children's experiences of forced migration and the barriers they face in accessing essential safeguards illustrate critical gaps in protecting their right to health.

In view of the United Nations' goal to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) by 2030, this paper investigates MakueniCare, the highly successful UHC program in Makueni County, Kenya, to reveal the spirit of human rights underlying it. Drawing on international, Kenyan, and Makueni County law and policy, as well as 30 interviews with government and civil society leaders in health care policy and programming at the national and county levels, we examine the human rights law and principles that underlie the adoption and implementation of MakueniCare. We first set out key human rights principles grounded in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the 2010 Kenyan Constitution, and then describe the research design and methodology of the project. Then, we analyze the data collected to highlight the various ways in which the adoption and implementation of MakueniCare were influenced by human rights, particularly the right to health. We conclude with thoughts on how MakueniCare could be further improved from a human rights perspective.

Reproductive rights and reproductive justice paradigms have long been viewed as incompatible, largely because of their divergent orientations to the notion of choice. According to this oppositional framing, reproductive rights approaches have centered the right of (white, middle-class, heterosexual) women to choose not to have children while reproductive justice organizing has focused on gendered, racialized, and classed obstacles to control over whether and how to have and raise children. Amid increasing examination of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) vis-à-vis human rights principles, I see an opportunity to narrow the perceived gap between the politics of rights and justice. Human rights organizations and scholars are recognizing the stratification of medical infertility rates and ART access, and human rights courts are articulating the right to assisted reproduction as part of a fundamental right to reproductive health. In reframing the opportunity to choose assisted reproduction as a justice issue, I seek to unsettle the traditional bifurcation of these political logics.