J. Tobin, The Right to Health in International Law

What role, if any, can the right to health play in improving people’s health in a world where, despite significant technological advancement and a yearly global expenditure of $US5.3 trillion in the field, millions of individuals still die everyday of health problems—such as diarrhoea, malaria, tuberculosis, malnutrition—easily preventable with simple public health and medical interventions? This is the important question that John Tobin sets himself to answer in his ambitious, comprehensive and thoroughly researched book The Right to Health in International Law. As his highly informative and detailed first chapter on the history of the right to health makes clear, this right was first recognised in the constitution of the World Health Organisation (WHO) of 1946, which stated that ‘[t]he enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being’. In 1976, the broad WHO formulation achieved independent and binding legal...

Constitution · Global health · Health care · Human rights · Political science · Public health · Right to health · Global Security and Public Health · Human Rights and Development · Law · Medicine · Nursing