The human rights theme of this year’s APHA Convention in Boston was, I think, just right. The group I belong to, APHA’s Health law Forum, is now better known as the “Health Law and Human Rights Forum.” This is because public health and human rights seem made for each other, as it is impossible for large populations to experience the benefits of health without governments’ meeting their international human rights obligations, particularly the human “right to health.” The aspirational goal of social justice also fits well with this view, because human rights can be seen both as intrinsically important and also as the primary pragmatic instrument to effectively pursue social justice and equality. Protecting the public’s health is by its nature a governmental obligation, and it can be conceptually useful to simply substitute “government” for “public” in the phrase “public health.”

Many people have a tendency to equate human rights with political and civil rights, and thus concentrate on contemporary issues like torture, fair trials, application of the Geneva Conventions, and the lawful conduct of war. These are all critical, and there is no doubt that war is always a public health disaster. While political and civil rights are a major part of the world of human rights, they do not exhaust it. Equally important are what are usually called economic and social rights, including the right to health, the right to education, and the right to employment. And the more we recognize that public health is a global concern (although like the environmental movement, we can “think globally and act locally”), the more we will recognize that the language of public health action must be the global language of international human rights.

Jonathan Mann was the first to clearly articulate this vision in the context of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, and he also realized that human rights precepts are critical to the practice of public health. As he proposed, and I continue to endorse, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) should be recognized and adopted as the best statement of public health ethics possible. In explicitly adopting the language of human rights to foster public health, public health also simultaneously recognizes that prevention of disease, as necessary as it is, is not a sufficient goal to promote the health of the public. More is required, and that more is well summed up in the UDHR. In this regard, it is also useful to note that human rights are not in opposition to preparedness [free access article], and there is no safety in attempting to trade human rights for security: Our security is based on our human rights and the recognition that all humans are a part of our global community and that all should participate in decisions that directly affect their rights and their welfare.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 1:12 pm and is filed under All Categories, Bioethics, Health Law, Public Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.