Section outline

  • The learning outcome of this Topic is: To understand the concept of the role of legal frameworks might  have in upholding human rights in relation to health.

    Meir and colleagues, in a paper in Health and Human Rights, state that "National legal frameworks that uphold health-related human rights encourage a rights-based public policy that gives meaning to international treaty obligations and provides for individual causes of action, ensuring human rights accountability for global health advancement. Accordingly, such national law has laid the groundwork for a rapidly expanding accountability movement at the intersection of health and human rights, empowering individuals and groups to raise human rights claims and providing rights-based enforcement for health. Supporting the implementation of human rights, these cases have been shown to provide essential medicines to the sick, to alleviate state infringements on individual liberties, and to restrict harmful determinants of the public’s health......

    The O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, the World Health Organization, and the Lawyers Collective have come together to develop a searchable Global Health and Human Rights Database that maps the intersection of health and human rights in judgments, international and regional instruments, and national constitutions."

    The database is an excellent resource and easy to use. Searching through it will provide an excellent introduction to this Topic.

    A Lancet Commission on Global Health and the Law has been formed, and states: "Law at the international, national, and subnational levels has been an effective, although often underappreciated, way to safeguard and promote global health. By law we mean the statutes and regulations that express public policy as well as public institutions, including courts, legislatures, and agencies responsible for creating, implementing, and interpreting the law. Law has a fundamental, yet underused and underdeveloped, role in providing solutions to global health challenges. We are, therefore, launching a Lancet–O'Neill Institute, Georgetown University Commission on Global Health and the Law to examine the vital role of law in responding to major global health challenges." You can keep up to date on the activities of the Commission on their web site and you might also like to read the comment by Richard Horton in the Lancet: The rule of law—an invisible determinant of health.

    In the resources section below you will be able to explore case studies relating to prisoners' rights, criminalisation as a Public Health approach, informed consent, reproductive and migrant health, and the legal instruments that underpin international human rights