The Evolution of Applying Human Rights Frameworks to Health

This chapter explores the evolution and struggles of the “health and human rights movement,” focusing particularly on relevant developments in health and international law that enabled greater attention to the right to health. It discusses the evolution of human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) to health, which extended these legal concepts into the domains of development and social policy. Over twenty years after it began to take shape, the “health and human rights” field is not one discipline but many. This cluster of related work now faces the new challenges of a precariously constructed international normative scaffolding, the rising complexities of moving from constitutional norms to effective enjoyment in practice at the national level, and the potential danger of HRBAs being reduced to technocratic formulas and emptied of their subversive potential.

Environmental ethics · Environmental health · Field (mathematics) · Human health · Human rights · Law and economics · Normative · Political science · Politics · Right to health · Sociology · Technocracy · Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology · Global Security and Public Health · Human Rights and Development · Law · Medicine