Health and Human Rights最新文献

In this paper, we seek to contextualize amputations sustained by Palestinians during the Great March of Return within a framework of settler-colonial ideology and practice. Utilizing case studies identified in our advocacy work at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, we evaluate the conditions in which these amputations occurred and their relationship to the politicized Palestinian body, land, and nation. Through evaluating themes of intentionality and subjugation, the politicized Palestinian body, and reflections on the challenges of navigating human rights and humanitarian possibilities, we reflect on our work and the ability to advocate for health justice in inherently violent and eliminatory bureaucratic and legal systems. We conclude with a discussion on the utility of a human rights approach that is divorced from a structural and historical analysis of the dire situation on the ground.

This paper examines the process of depoliticization of mental health in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) and links it to a critical analysis of post-traumatic stress disorder and the role of international humanitarian aid. It is based on a human rights framework that focuses on the right to health and that is instrumental in connecting human rights violations to demands of social justice. Efforts to weaken justice and reparations are analyzed by looking at the role of mental health professionals and assumptions of psychotherapy as a neutral and nonpolitical sphere. By drawing on models of decoloniality and liberation psychology, we advocate for a shift from a decontextualized and individualistic approach to mental health to acknowledging the structural, social, and political oppression that are the underlying factors for suffering in the oPt. In order to alleviate the social suffering of Palestinians and to prevent their victimization, interventions that acknowledge the political nature of mental health ill-being and promote a human rights approach are needed.

Global disparities in access to COVID-19 vaccines have brought back into focus questions about whether the right to medicines has assumed any level of binding legality within international law. In this paper, we attempt to answer this question by considering if there is evidence of subsequent state agreement and practice to read the right to medicines into the rights to health and science protected in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. We adopt the interpretive framework in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and the International Law Commission's 2018 report to analyze the work of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights relevant to medicines, and its relationship to the content and voting in successive resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly. We find that these resolutions provide some evidence of state agreement that the rights to health and science, as enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, include access to affordable medicines. Yet the legal implications of this right remain highly contested, particularly when it comes to trade-related intellectual property rights. The negotiation of a pandemic treaty offers possibilities for codifying this right beyond these discursive instances, while political opposition remains likely to continue to undercut this emerging legal norm.

As countries across the world adopt policies addressing menstruation, it is imperative to identify who benefits from such policies and to understand the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. We examine such policies through the lens of human rights, as a framework that demands addressing marginalization, ensuring substantive equality, and guaranteeing inclusive participation to ensure that the menstrual needs of everyone, everywhere are met. Our review is focused on four countries (India, Kenya, Senegal, and the United States) and is based on data from 34 policy documents and interviews with 85 participants. We show that girls, particularly school-going girls, are the main target group of policies. Due to this myopic view of menstrual needs, policies risk leaving the needs of adult menstruators, including those experiencing (peri)menopause, unaddressed. Moreover, the intersection between menstrual status and markers of identity such as disability and gender identity produces further policy gaps. These gaps can be attributed to the exclusion of marginalized menstruators from decision-making processes by creating barriers and failing to ensure meaningful inclusive participation. To address inequalities, policy makers need to make a concerted effort to understand and accommodate the needs of menstruators in all their diversity.

As part of global efforts to reach herd immunity to stem the spread of COVID-19, the government of Ghana in 2021 declared December as the month of vaccination. Along with the declaration were statements about the government's intention to make vaccination mandatory in January 2022 for select groups of persons and to restrict access of unvaccinated persons to certain public spaces. The directives attracted varied reactions since they touched on constitutionally guaranteed fundamental human rights. Later, in March 2022, the president eased some restrictions, such as mask wearing and social distancing at public events but subject to all users being fully vaccinated. This paper analyzes the constitutional and human rights implications of a vaccine mandate in Ghana. It answers the question, Is mandatory vaccination necessary and appropriate given the COVID-19 situation in Ghana? I make a case for finding a reasonable balance between the personal liberties of Ghanaians and the state's responsibility to protect public health. Using the proportionality test, I argue that while mandatory vaccination is permissible within Ghana's legal and constitutional framework, a tiered approach is preferable.

This paper connects two seemingly distinct subjects-the right to health and children's play in contexts of a militarized settler colony. Following Ignacio Martín-Baró's articulation of a critical psychology "of the people," we outline the spatial and psychosocial economies of childhood outdoor play as forms of social and political determinants of health and human rights.¹ We offer an analysis through the words and reflections of Palestinian Jerusalemite children that expose the mundane violence produced and sustained by the colonizer, whereby children's play creates spaces of livability against necropolitics. We draw on 50 observations of Palestinian children's play of Ghummeida-hide and seek-spanning 2020 through 2022 in four locations in occupied East Jerusalem. Our analysis proposes three overlapping fields through which Ghummeida operates: as a game, as resistance to spatial suffocation, and against unchilding. Across each of these fields, children's ways of embodying their right to play and live are presented as acts of refusing the chronic political violence they are exposed to. The produced processes include generativity, ownership of space, the surface and the body, and psychic repair. The paper concludes by unveiling how Ghummeida, with its metaphoric and embodied imprints, enables Palestinian children's psychosocial well-being, and pursuit of human rights, through defying their reality under a brutal system of apartheid.