A recent joint communiqué by 25 Heads of Government and the WHO Director-General have called for the negotiation of a pandemic treaty to enable countries around the world to strengthen national, regional and global capacities and resilience to future pandemics, as a binding instrument to promote and protect health in the context of pandemics. The authors recommend that if WHO Member States decide that an international treaty is the way forward, it would be important to have clarity from the outset on the elements and areas that will be the subject of negotiation, by identifying aspects that the current crisis has revealed are not working. They recommend building on the existing instruments, notably the International Health Regulations and discuss critical issues that should be addressed in such a treaty if negotiations are launched,given that countries differ in needs, levels of development and capacities to implement treaty obligations.
Values, Policies and Rights
The current context indicates that exceptional measures designed to combat the spread of COVID-19 need to be continually evaluated, taking into account the positive obligations that States bear to protect life, access to health and health security, and the extent to which these obligations should be shaped by countervailing negative rights. The authors indicate that striking an appropriate balance between these positive obligations and countervailing negative rights, in this rapidly evolving environment, can only be successfully achieved in an environment of democratic, judicial and scientific contestation. Moreover, in the context of positive obligations, it is imperative to emphasise the least coercive means through which public health can be achieved. This report provides a human rights analysis using this lens of a cross section of jurisdictions from different countries globally, including South Africa and Zimbabwe.
In order to understand how and why social movements are fighting for women's health and rights you need to have a 21st century notion of these rights. This is a central message of the book Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights. The rights that Rosalind Pollack Petchesky discusses are not those determined by grey-suited lawyers and bureaucrats, and enshrined as fixed, universal, and unalienable principles. They are rights that exist in an era of global capitalism; rights that are influenced by sex, race, class, geography, and ethnicity; rights that are dynamic and malleable; and rights that, above all, are a necessary and irrepressible element of movements for social change. Petchesky views individual and social rights as "two sides of the same coin". She ascribes equal importance to social and economic rights as to those related to reproduction, sexuality, and health; noting that together they form "a single fabric of rights".
In this journal feature, Issa Shivji, Peter Lawrence, John Saul, Natasha Shivji, Ray Bush and Ndongo Samba Sylla pay tribute to the late Samir Amin. Issa Shivji writes of Amin’s support for younger generations, ‘His intellectual works, scholarly contributions and political interventions have been sufficiently covered in dozens of tributes that are pouring in every day. I will not go over them. I wanted specifically to capture Samir’s attitude and treatment of younger generations, done as a matter of course and without pretense.’ Peter Lawrence highlights one of Amin’s key ideas, ‘Amin rejected the prevailing view in both the capitalist ‘West’ and the socialist ‘East’ that development entailed catching up with the developed capitalist countries. … The history of the world was not about followers catching up with leaders but about dominant civilizations being ‘transcended’ by peripheral ones as the former decline and the peripheral overtake them with different social organizations.’ John Saul illuminates Amin’s concept of ‘an actual and active ‘delinking’ of the economies of the Global South from the Empire of Capital that otherwise holds the South in its sway. For Amin, delinking was best defined as ‘the submission of external relations [to internal requirements], the opposite of the internal adjustment of the peripheries to the demands of the polarizing worldwide expansion of capital’. Amin saw it as being ‘the only realistic alternative [since] reform of the [present] world system is utopian.’ Ndongo Samba Sylla concludes by writing on Amin’s notion of ‘daring’ in coordinated struggles, ‘by the emergence of an anti-monopolies front [in the Global North] and in the Global South by that of an anti-comprador front' challenging subservience to neoliberal globalisation. The authors collectively highlight how through his writings, his interventions and engagement Amin profiled the perspective of the Global South 'and the wretched of the earth.’
In a letter to his five children written en route to Bolivia, Ernesto Che Guevara said: “Always be able to feel deep within your being all the injustices committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality a revolutionary can have.” This article about Che Guevara, 50 years after his execution, explores Che’s story and legacy. His tutelage in revolutionary thought came from his experiences among the leprosy patients of Venezuela and the tin miners of Bolivia, among the revolutionaries of Argentina and the 1954 coup in Guatemala. Reality radicalised him. Mario Terán Salazar, the soldier who shot Che, went into hiding. Many years later, in 2006, the Cuban government operated on Che’s killer to remove a cataract from his eye without charge. The author points to this to highlight that Che’s legacy was not revenge, but doctor’s love for humanity.
In Kenya, access to essential medicines is ensured legislatively for HIV, TB and malaria specifically, but delivery is patchy. The situation is improving, but not universally, and there is a continued assault on the IP Act and generic procurements by those who want to profit from selling essential drugs for the poor. Access to medicines is an issue that needs a balance between political will and public involvement/civil society demands. Civil society can demand their rights are realised through campaigns to implement the WTO rules that were designed to protect peoples' access to essential medicines and by stopping the assaults on the procurement of generics, increasing the availability of essential medicines, funding research and development for the medicines we need and abolishing taxes on essential medicines. Providing free essential medicines is the only affordable option for most of the population. This report was presented at the Africa Regional Civil Society meeting on the IGWG on Public Health, Innovation and Access, in Nairobi, Kenya, 28–29 August, 2007.
Health Systems Trust has summarised South Africa’s National Strategic Plan (NSP) for easy reading. The NSP is a strategic guide for South Africa’s national response to HIV, STIs and TB from 2012 to 2016. It is coordinated by the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC). It aims to inform national, provincial, district and community-level stakeholders with strategic directions when developing implementation plans. The Plan contains baseline data on the various diseases and identifies key populations for HIV and TB response. Its goals are to reduce the number of HIV infections by 50%; ensure at least 80% of patients eligible for antiretroviral treatment are receiving it, with 70% alive and being treated after five years; reduce the number of new infections of TB and deaths by 50%; ensure the rights of individuals living with HIV, TB and STIs are protected; and reduce self-reported stigma associated with HIV and TB by 50%. The Plan also outlines how the goals will be reached, who will oversee implementation of goals and how progress of the NSP will be assessed. Implementing the NSP is estimated to cost R130.7 billion over five years.
In this paper, grounded theory procedures were use to analyse literature pertaining to dignity and to conduct and analyse 64 semi-structured interviews with persons marginalised by their health or social status, individuals who provide health or social services to these populations, and people working in the field of health and human rights. The results showed that the taxonomy presented identifies two main forms of dignity – human dignity and social dignity – and describes several elements of these forms, including the social processes that violate or promote them, the conditions under which such violations and promotions occur, the objects of violation and promotion and the consequences of dignity violation. Together, these forms and elements point to a human rights-based theory of dignity that can be applied to the health sector.
In this report, UN Women calls for a specific commitment to achieving gender equality, women’s rights and women’s empowerment in the post-2015 development framework and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as robust mainstreaming of gender considerations across all parts of the framework. To make a difference, the new framework must be transformative, by addressing the structural impediments to gender equality and the achievement of women’s rights. In order to address the structural causes of gender-based discrimination and to support true transformation in gender relations, the report proposes an integrated approach that addresses three critical target areas of gender equality, women’s rights and women’s empowerment. 1. Freedom from violence against women and girls, which includes concrete actions to eliminate the debilitating fear and/or experience of violence as the centre-piece of any future framework. 2. Gender equality in the distribution of capabilities – knowledge, good health, sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights of women and adolescent girls; and access to resources and opportunities, including land, decent work and equal pay to build women’s economic and social security. 3. Gender equality in decision-making power in public and private institutions, in national parliaments and local councils, the media and civil society, in the management and governance of firms, and in families and communities.
Tradition and culture, the determination and ingenuity of women, and the concern and commitment of health care providers often circumvent the law to find expression. For example, though legal reform is not yet feasible in Mozambique, three large public hospitals have begun to provide elective abortions.