Lisa Forman
Biographic Data
| ID | 83428 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lisa Forman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lisa |
| FAMILY NAME | Forman |
| SIGNATURE | FORMAN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4200-9359 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Equity, Human Rights, and the Quest for Coherence in Global Health Law
The health crisis of COVID-19 has provoked a pivotal moment of global health law reform that comes against larger shifts against international law, democracy, and human rights. In this light, it is perhaps not surprising that state-led amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR)—international law’s primary instrument governing state responses to public health crises—and a prospective Pandemic Agreement—designed to remedy the former’s…
Creating undeserving citizens
Debates about restricting birthright citizenship have invoked the term “birth tourism,” referring to racialized pregnant women suspected of traveling to a country with birthright citizenship solely to give birth to secure citizenship for their child. Although legal, Canadian media rhetoric frames “birth tourism” as fraudulent and stereotypes racialized immigrant mothers as morally suspect, while questioning the legitimacy of their children’s citi…
Accountability in global health systems
Beginning in 1996, Purdue Pharmaceuticals (Purdue) knowingly mislabeled and mass marketed OxyContin (oxycodone), an opioid painkiller, catalyzing the opioid crisis which has been responsible for more than 600 000 deaths in and beyond North America. This case is an extreme example of how transnational pharmaceutical companies prioritize shareholder profits over public wellbeing. As such, the field of global health faces the critical challenge of b…
The fragile relationship between the amended International Health Regulations and human rights law
Young people’s lived sexual and reproductive health citizenship
This qualitative, focused critical ethnographic study explores how young people's 'lived SRH citizenship' and their active roles realising their sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and rights, shape their agency and participation in decision-making in Malawi. Informed by postcolonial feminist and difference-centred citizenship theories, our findings reveal that age-based power differentials, systems of gerontocracy and a culture of adultism impe…
Interconnected influence
This study advances understandings of the complex interplay between transnational pharmaceutical companies, global health systems, regulatory bodies, and public health. In doing so, we underscore the need for stronger regulation and increased transparency surrounding the interactions between pharma, patient groups, governments, and international organizations to better address and prevent future harms
Covid-19 vaccine equity and the right to health for displaced Venezuelans in Latin America
Given the magnitude of Venezuelan displacement in Latin America, there is a need to assess how migrants were, and will continue to be, addressed in COVID-19 vaccination policies. To explore migration status as a dimension of vaccine equity in Latin America and in relation to international human rights, we assessed national vaccination plans, peer-reviewed, and gray literature published between January 2020 and June 2021. Three key rights-related …
Can we move beyond vaccine apartheid? Examining the determinants of the Covid-19 vaccine gap
While global health leaders call disparities in access to COVID-19 vaccines an 'apartheid,' this gap is not the first such disparity. The recurrence of these gaps in low and middle-income countries and especially in Africa, raises questions about their determinants and about the persistent failures of global health institutions to remediate them. We interrogate these determinants and questions by examining: (1) the distribution of COVID-19 vaccin…
Structural violence and the uncertainty of viral undetectability for African, Caribbean and Black people living with HIV in Canada
Biomedical advances in healthcare and antiretroviral treatment or therapy (ART) have transformed HIV/AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable chronic disease. Studies demonstrate that people living with HIV who adhere to antiretroviral therapy can achieve viral suppression or undetectability, which is fundamental for optimizing health outcomes, decreasing HIV-related mortality and morbidity, and preventing HIV transmission. African, Caribbean, …
From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to a Pandemic Treaty
Global disparities in access to COVID-19 vaccines have illuminated long-standing tensions between intellectual property rights and the right to health. Debates over solutions to these disparities have focused on a waiver to the TRIPS Agreement and a prospective pandemic treaty which will attempt to regulate the impact of intellectual property rights on access to essential pandemic health goods. These disparities and debates underscore the imperat…
Between rules and resistance
In times of a public health emergency, lawyers and ethicists play a key role in ensuring that government responses, such as travel restrictions, are both legally and ethically justified. However, when travel bans were imposed in a broadly discriminatory manner against southern African countries in response to the Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant in late 2021, considerations of law, ethics or science did not appear to guide politicians’ decisions. Rathe…
Unmasking legislative constraints
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) epidemic significantly impacts African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) immigrants in Canada. Health scholarship has revealed striking injustices within Canada’s public healthcare system that restrict access to healthcare and violate the human rights of ACB immigrants living with HIV who are marginalized. We conducted an institutional ethnography to comprehensively understand how HIV healthcare in Ontario is orga…
Revisiting the Legality of Travel Restrictions Under International Law During Covid-19
Under the International Health Regulations (IHR), States must consider decision-making criteria in applying travel restrictions during a public health emergency of international concern. Interpretation on the legal parameters of such restrictions varies widely. This article considers whether and how the permissibility of travel restrictions under the IHR may have changed given recent developments, including evolving scientific evidence about thei…
Legislatively Excluded, Medically Uninsured and Structurally Violated
African, Caribbean and Black immigrants face persistent legislative barriers to accessing healthcare services in Canada. This Institutional Ethnography examines how structural violence and exclusionary legislative frameworks restrict the right to HIV healthcare access for many Black immigrants. We conducted semi-structured interviews with Black immigrants living with HIV ( n = 20) and healthcare workers in Toronto, Canada ( n = 15), and analyzed …
Decolonising human rights
The recent rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines offers hope in addressing the worst pandemic in a hundred years. However, many countries in the Global South face great difficulties in accessing vaccines, partly because of restrictive intellectual property law. These laws exacerbate both global and domestic inequalities and prevent countries from fully realising the right to health for all their people. Commodification of essential medicines, su…
An intersectional human rights approach to prioritising access to Covid-19 vaccines
We finally have a vaccine for the COVID-19 crisis. However, due to the limited numbers of the vaccine, states will have to consider how to prioritise groups who receive the vaccine. In this paper, we argue that the practical implementation of human rights law requires broader consideration of intersectional needs in society and the disproportionate impact that COVID-19 is having on population groups with pre-existing social and medical vulnerabil…
Health and human rights are inextricably linked in the Covid-19 response
To mitigate the spread of COVID-19, governments throughout the world have introduced emergency measures that constrain individual freedoms, social and economic rights and global solidarity. These regulatory measures have closed schools, workplaces and transit systems, cancelled public gatherings, introduced mandatory home confinement and deployed large-scale electronic surveillance. In doing so, human rights obligations are rarely addressed, desp…
Commentary on an article by Alberto Quintavalla & Klaus Heine. Recognizing the importance of the right to health as a prerequisite to rights hierarchization
Global health and human rights in the time of Covid-19
Policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted a range of human rights, with the pandemic being used to justify police violence, authoritarian power grabs, and corruption. Health systems in high- and low-income countries have struggled to provide adequate COVID-19 testing, tracing, and treatment, with non-COVID-19 healthcare-restricted, vulnerable populations at high risk of infection and negative health and social impacts, and lockdowns…
Analyzing the impact of trade and investment agreements on pharmaceutical policy
BACKGROUND: Trade and investment agreements negotiated after the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) have included increasingly elevated protection of intellectual property rights along with an expanding array of rules impacting many aspects of pharmaceutical policy. Despite the large body of literature on intellectual property and access to affordable medicines, the ways in which …
What do human rights bring to discussions of power and politics in health policy and systems
Scholarly interrogations of power and politics are not endemic to the disciplines primarily tasked with exploring health policy and planning in the domestic or global domains. Scholars in these domains have come late to investigating power, prompted in part by the growing focus in domestic and global health research on the intersections between governance, globalization and health inequities. Recent prominent reports in this area increasingly poi…
Lessons learned
Currently, two billion people lack regular access to essential medicines in contradiction of their right to health under international law. With the rapid growth of intellectual property provisions in international trade agreements in recent years, governments are increasingly bound to provide stringent patent protection to pharmaceuticals, resulting in higher drug prices, which exacerbate the inaccessibility of medicines. As a result, there is a…
Conceptualising minimum core obligations under the right to health
To prevent progressive realisation within resources from undermining both domestic and international responsibilities towards health, international human rights law institutions developed the idea that these rights hold an inviolable ‘core’ equivalent to essential health needs. Yet few aspects of this right and indeed of economic social and cultural rights have generated greater debate and unresolved questions than the core concept: Is the core f…
Bioethics and the Right to Health
This special section in Health and Human Rights Journal explores the relationship between bioethics and the right to health. Although bioethics scholars may argue for a right to health, particularly in the domains of universal health coverage and global health governance, and human rights scholars may advance ethical norms in their work, there has been little scholarly attention to the intersections, synergies, and contrasts between these two are…
Moving Theory into Practice
This article explores the development of methodologies for human rights and right to health-specific impact assessment of trade-related intellectual property rights. These methodologies seek to respond to the restrictive impact of international and bilateral trade rules on domestic and global policy options to ensure access to affordable medicines in low and middle-income countries. Methodologies for right to health-specific impact assessment are…
Genetic variation within and among lion tamarins
The golden lion tamarin Leontopithecus rosalia rosalia , one of the rarest and most endangered of New World primates, has been the focus of an intensive research and conservation effort for two decades. During that period, managed breeding from 44 founders has brought the captive population to over 400 individuals, a number that equals or exceeds the estimated number of free‐ranging golden lion tamarins. The extent of genetic variation among gold…
Global health and human rights in the time of Covid-19
Policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted a range of human rights, with the pandemic being used to justify police violence, authoritarian power grabs, and corruption. Health systems in high- and low-income countries have struggled to provide adequate COVID-19 testing, tracing, and treatment, with non-COVID-19 healthcare-restricted, vulnerable populations at high risk of infection and negative health and social impacts, and lockdowns…
Trade Rules, Intellectual Property, and the Right to Health
In perpetuating and exacerbating restricted access to essential medicines, current trade-related intellectual property rules on medicines may violate core human rights to health and medicines. In this light, their impact on the global disease burden raises serious questions about their necessity, and their justification should be critically assessed from the perspective of human rights standards. These standards require that international trade r…
Legislatively Excluded, Medically Uninsured and Structurally Violated
African, Caribbean and Black immigrants face persistent legislative barriers to accessing healthcare services in Canada. This Institutional Ethnography examines how structural violence and exclusionary legislative frameworks restrict the right to HIV healthcare access for many Black immigrants. We conducted semi-structured interviews with Black immigrants living with HIV ( n = 20) and healthcare workers in Toronto, Canada ( n = 15), and analyzed …
"Rights" and Wrongs
This paper explores the legal and normativepotential of the right to health to mitigate the restrictive impact of trade-related intellectual property rules on access to medicines, as evidenced by the global outcomes of the seminal pharmaceutical company litigation in South Africa in 2001. I argue that the litigation and resulting public furor provoked a paradigm shift in global approaches to AIDS treatment in sub-Saharan Africa. I argue further t…
Evaluating essential health packages from a human rights perspective
Many countries at all levels of development have formulated an essential health package, sometimes also referred to as a health benefit plan or a health benefit basket. As defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), essential health packages (EHPs) are “health service interventions that are considered important and that society decides should be provided to everyone.” Although EHPs are not often formulated from an explicitly human rights pers…
Public Health Agenda Setting in a Global Context
We drew on two agenda-setting theories usually applied at the state or national level to assess their utility at the global level: Kingdon’s multiple streams theory and Baumgartner and Jones’s punctuated equilibrium theory. We illustrate our analysis with findings from a qualitative study of the International Labor Organization’s Decent Work Agenda. We found that both theories help explain the agenda-setting mechanisms that operate in the global …
Competing conceptualizations of decent work at the intersection of health, social and economic discourses
Conceptualising minimum core obligations under the right to health
To prevent progressive realisation within resources from undermining both domestic and international responsibilities towards health, international human rights law institutions developed the idea that these rights hold an inviolable ‘core’ equivalent to essential health needs. Yet few aspects of this right and indeed of economic social and cultural rights have generated greater debate and unresolved questions than the core concept: Is the core f…
Moving Theory into Practice
This article explores the development of methodologies for human rights and right to health-specific impact assessment of trade-related intellectual property rights. These methodologies seek to respond to the restrictive impact of international and bilateral trade rules on domestic and global policy options to ensure access to affordable medicines in low and middle-income countries. Methodologies for right to health-specific impact assessment are…
Human Rights and Health Impact Assessments of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights
In recent years, there has been growing concern about the negative impact on access to affordable medicines of international trade rules, including the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and bilateral and regional free trade agreements containing “TRIPS-Plus” rights. These rules run counter to the human rights imperative to increase access to affordable medicines with deleterious im…
A global social contract to reduce maternal mortality
Progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5a, reducing maternal deaths by 75% between 1990 and 2015, has been substantial; however, it has been too slow to hope for its achievement by 2015, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, including Uganda. This suggests that both the Government of Uganda and the international community are failing to comply with their right-to-health-related obligations towards the people of Uganda. This country case study…
Making the Case for Human Rights in Global Health Education, Research and Policy
Genetic variation within and among lion tamarins
The golden lion tamarin Leontopithecus rosalia rosalia , one of the rarest and most endangered of New World primates, has been the focus of an intensive research and conservation effort for two decades. During that period, managed breeding from 44 founders has brought the captive population to over 400 individuals, a number that equals or exceeds the estimated number of free‐ranging golden lion tamarins. The extent of genetic variation among gold…
Trade Rules, Intellectual Property, and the Right to Health
In perpetuating and exacerbating restricted access to essential medicines, current trade-related intellectual property rules on medicines may violate core human rights to health and medicines. In this light, their impact on the global disease burden raises serious questions about their necessity, and their justification should be critically assessed from the perspective of human rights standards. These standards require that international trade r…
Exploring synergies between human rights and public health ethics
BACKGROUND: The fields of human rights and public health ethics are each concerned with promoting health and elucidating norms for action. To date, however, little has been written about the contribution that these two justificatory frameworks can make together. This article explores how a combined approach may make a more comprehensive contribution to resolving normative health issues and to advancing a normative framework for global health acti…
Environmental justice and the rights of unborn and future generations
Laura Westra (Earthscan, London, 2006) 349 pp., including notes, $110.00 (£65.00) (hdbk), ISBN 1-84407-366-1.sp = 1 > With global awareness of the environmental harms of Western consumerism and in
"Rights" and Wrongs
This paper explores the legal and normativepotential of the right to health to mitigate the restrictive impact of trade-related intellectual property rules on access to medicines, as evidenced by the global outcomes of the seminal pharmaceutical company litigation in South Africa in 2001. I argue that the litigation and resulting public furor provoked a paradigm shift in global approaches to AIDS treatment in sub-Saharan Africa. I argue further t…
Making the Case for Human Rights in Global Health Education, Research and Policy
What could a strengthened right to health bring to the post-2015 health development agenda
BACKGROUND: Global health institutions increasingly recognize that the right to health should guide the formulation of replacement goals for the Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015. However, the right to health's contribution is undercut by the principle of progressive realization, which links provision of health services to available resources, permitting states to deny even basic levels of health coverage domestically and allowin…
A global social contract to reduce maternal mortality
Progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5a, reducing maternal deaths by 75% between 1990 and 2015, has been substantial; however, it has been too slow to hope for its achievement by 2015, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, including Uganda. This suggests that both the Government of Uganda and the international community are failing to comply with their right-to-health-related obligations towards the people of Uganda. This country case study…
The Right to Health at the Public/Private Divide
Through a comparative global study of countries from all continents representing a diversity of health, legal, political, and economic systems, this book explores the role of health rights in advancing greater equality through access to health care. Does health care promote equality, or does it in fact advance the opposite result? Does inserting the idea of 'the right to health' into health systems allow the reinsertion of public values into syst…
A case study of global health at the university
BACKGROUND: Global health is increasingly a major focus of institutions in high-income countries. However, little work has been done to date to study the inner workings of global health at the university level. Academics may have competing objectives, with few mechanisms to coordinate efforts and pool resources. OBJECTIVE: To conduct a case study of global health at Canada's largest health sciences university and to examine how its internal organ…
Is universal health coverage the practical expression of the right to health care
The present Millennium Development Goals are set to expire in 2015 and their next iteration is now being discussed within the international community. With regards to health, the World Health Organization proposes universal health coverage as a 'single overarching health goal' for the next iteration of the Millennium Development Goals.The present Millennium Development Goals have been criticised for being 'duplicative' or even 'competing alternat…
Could international compulsory licensing reconcile tiered pricing of pharmaceuticals with the right to health
BACKGROUND: The heads of the Global Fund and the GAVI Alliance have recently promoted the idea of an international tiered pricing framework for medicines, despite objections from civil society groups who fear that this would reduce the leeway for compulsory licenses and generic competition. This paper explores the extent to which an international tiered pricing framework and the present leeway for compulsory licensing can be reconciled, using the…
The Value of Mainstreaming Human Rights into Health Impact Assessment
Health impact assessment (HIA) is increasingly being used to predict the health and social impacts of domestic and global laws, policies and programs. In a comprehensive review of HIA practice in 2012, the authors indicated that, given the diverse range of HIA practice, there is an immediate need to reconsider the governing values and standards for HIA implementation [1]. This article responds to this call for governing values and standards for H…
Human Rights and Health Impact Assessments of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights
In recent years, there has been growing concern about the negative impact on access to affordable medicines of international trade rules, including the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and bilateral and regional free trade agreements containing “TRIPS-Plus” rights. These rules run counter to the human rights imperative to increase access to affordable medicines with deleterious im…
Bioethics and the Right to Health
This special section in Health and Human Rights Journal explores the relationship between bioethics and the right to health. Although bioethics scholars may argue for a right to health, particularly in the domains of universal health coverage and global health governance, and human rights scholars may advance ethical norms in their work, there has been little scholarly attention to the intersections, synergies, and contrasts between these two are…
Moving Theory into Practice
This article explores the development of methodologies for human rights and right to health-specific impact assessment of trade-related intellectual property rights. These methodologies seek to respond to the restrictive impact of international and bilateral trade rules on domestic and global policy options to ensure access to affordable medicines in low and middle-income countries. Methodologies for right to health-specific impact assessment are…
Evaluating essential health packages from a human rights perspective
Many countries at all levels of development have formulated an essential health package, sometimes also referred to as a health benefit plan or a health benefit basket. As defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), essential health packages (EHPs) are “health service interventions that are considered important and that society decides should be provided to everyone.” Although EHPs are not often formulated from an explicitly human rights pers…
Public Health Agenda Setting in a Global Context
We drew on two agenda-setting theories usually applied at the state or national level to assess their utility at the global level: Kingdon’s multiple streams theory and Baumgartner and Jones’s punctuated equilibrium theory. We illustrate our analysis with findings from a qualitative study of the International Labor Organization’s Decent Work Agenda. We found that both theories help explain the agenda-setting mechanisms that operate in the global …
Competing conceptualizations of decent work at the intersection of health, social and economic discourses
Lessons learned
Currently, two billion people lack regular access to essential medicines in contradiction of their right to health under international law. With the rapid growth of intellectual property provisions in international trade agreements in recent years, governments are increasingly bound to provide stringent patent protection to pharmaceuticals, resulting in higher drug prices, which exacerbate the inaccessibility of medicines. As a result, there is a…
Conceptualising minimum core obligations under the right to health
To prevent progressive realisation within resources from undermining both domestic and international responsibilities towards health, international human rights law institutions developed the idea that these rights hold an inviolable ‘core’ equivalent to essential health needs. Yet few aspects of this right and indeed of economic social and cultural rights have generated greater debate and unresolved questions than the core concept: Is the core f…
What do human rights bring to discussions of power and politics in health policy and systems
Scholarly interrogations of power and politics are not endemic to the disciplines primarily tasked with exploring health policy and planning in the domestic or global domains. Scholars in these domains have come late to investigating power, prompted in part by the growing focus in domestic and global health research on the intersections between governance, globalization and health inequities. Recent prominent reports in this area increasingly poi…
Analyzing the impact of trade and investment agreements on pharmaceutical policy
BACKGROUND: Trade and investment agreements negotiated after the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) have included increasingly elevated protection of intellectual property rights along with an expanding array of rules impacting many aspects of pharmaceutical policy. Despite the large body of literature on intellectual property and access to affordable medicines, the ways in which …
Health and human rights are inextricably linked in the Covid-19 response
To mitigate the spread of COVID-19, governments throughout the world have introduced emergency measures that constrain individual freedoms, social and economic rights and global solidarity. These regulatory measures have closed schools, workplaces and transit systems, cancelled public gatherings, introduced mandatory home confinement and deployed large-scale electronic surveillance. In doing so, human rights obligations are rarely addressed, desp…
Commentary on an article by Alberto Quintavalla & Klaus Heine. Recognizing the importance of the right to health as a prerequisite to rights hierarchization
Political science (39 works) · Law (32 works) · Human rights (26 works) · Medicine (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Human Rights and Development (20 works) · Right to health (20 works) · Health care (19 works) · Economics (18 works) · Economic growth (16 works)