Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-5wvtr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T23:49:40.123Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Rethinking Health and Human Rights: Time for a Paradigm Shift

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Extract

Medicine and its allied health sciences have for too long been peripherally involved in work on human rights. Fifty years ago, the door to greater involvement was opened by Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which underlined social and economic rights: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, G.A. Res. 217 A (III), U.N. Doc. A/810 (1948): at Article 25, available at <http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html>..>Google Scholar
The Sentencing Project, “U.S. Continues to be World Leader in Rate of Incarceration,” at <http://www.sentencingproject.org/news/usnol.pdf> (revised August 2001).+(revised+August+2001).>Google Scholar
Telzak, E.E. et al., “Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis in Patients Without HIV Infection,” N. Engl. J. Med., 333 (1995): 907–11; Mitnick, C. et al., “Treatment Outcomes in 75 Patients with Chronic Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis Enrolled in Aggressive Community-Based Therapy in Urban Peru,” International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, 5, no. 11, suppl. 1 (2001): S156; Farmer, P.E. et al., “Preliminary Results of Community-Based MDRTB Treatment in Lima, Peru,” International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, 2, no. 11, suppl. 2 (1998): S371; Farmer, P.E. et al., “Responding to Outbreaks of MDRTB: Introducing ‘DOTS-Plus,’” in Reichman, L.B. and Hershfield, E.S., eds., Tuberculosis: A Comprehensive International Approach, 2d ed. (New York: Marcel Dekker Inc., 1999): 447-69; Tahaoğlu, K. et al., “The Treatment of Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis in Turkey,” N. Engl. J. Med., 345 (2001): 170–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amnesty International, Torture in Russia: “This Man-Made Hell” (London: Amnesty International, 1997): at 31.Google Scholar
Dr.Vezhina, Natalya, Medical Director, TB Colony 33, Mariinsk, Kemerovo, Russian Federation; interview by author (Farmer), Mariinsk, September 1998.Google Scholar
Alexander, A., “Money Isn’t the Issue; It’s (Still) Political Will,” TB Monitor, 5, no. 5 (1998): 53.Google Scholar
See Farmer, et al. (1998), supra note 3.Google Scholar
See Campbell, D., “Herskovits, Cultural Relativism and Metascience,” in Herskovits, M., ed., Cultural Relativism: Perspectives in Cultural Pluralism (New York: Random House, 1972): 289315; Geertz, C., “Anti-anti-relativism,” American Anthropologist, 86 (1984): 263–78; Hatch, E., Culture and Morality: The Relativity of Values in Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Renteln, A.D., “Relativism and the Search for Human Rights,” American Anthropologist, 90 (1988): 56–72; Schmidt, P.F., “Some Criticisms of Cultural Relativism,” Journal of Philosophy, 70 (1955): 780–91.Google Scholar
The Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health: General Comment 14, United Nations, Economic and Social Council, E/C 12/2000/4 (2000), available at <http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/MasterFrameView/40d009901358b0e2c1256915005090be?Opendocument>..>Google Scholar
See Farmer, P.E. et al., “Community-Based Approaches to HIV Treatment in Resource-Poor Settings,” Lancet, 358 (2001): 404–09.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steiner, H. and Alston, P., International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Morals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): at vi.Google Scholar
Neier, A., War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice (New York: Times Books, 1998): at 75.Google Scholar
Cited in Steiner, and Alston, , supra note 11, at 141 (emphasis in the original).Google Scholar
Millen, J.V. and Holtz, T.H., “Dying for Growth, Part I: Transnational Corporation and the Health of the Poor,” in Kim, J.Y. et al., eds., Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2000): 177223, at 185.Google Scholar
See Farmer, P.E., “Cruel and Unusual: Drug Resistant Tuberculosis as Punishment,” in Stern, V. and Jones, R., eds., Sentenced to Die? The Problem of TB in Prisons in East and Central Europe and Central Asia (London: International Centre for Prison Studies, 1999): 7088; Wilkinson, R.G., Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality (London: Routledge, 1997); Kawachi, I. et al., “Social Capital, Income Inequality, and Mortality,” American Journal of Public Health, 87 (1997): 1491–98; Leclerc, A. et al., eds., Les Inégalités Sociales de Santé (Paris: Éditions la Découverte et Syros, 2000).Google Scholar
See Whitehead, M. et al., “Setting Targets to Address Inequalities in Health,” Lancet, 351 (1998): 1279–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farmer, P.E., “The Significance of Haiti,” in North American Congress on Latin America, ed., Haiti: Dangerous Crossroads (Boston: South End Press, 1995): 217–30.Google Scholar
See Concannon, B., “Beyond Complementarity: The International Criminal Court and National Prosecutions, A View from Haiti,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 32, no. 1 (2000): 201–50.Google Scholar
See Oficina los Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala (ODHAG), Guatemala: Nunca Más (Guatemala: Informe Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Historica, 1998).Google Scholar
See Neier, , supra note 12, at 33.Google Scholar
See Neier, A., “What Should be Done About the Guilty?,” The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1990, at 32–35.Google Scholar
See Guillermoprieto, A., The Heart that Bleeds: Latin America Now (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Chomsky, N., Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace (Boston: South End Press, 1985); LaFeber, W., Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: WW Norton, 1984).Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P., ed., La Misère du Monde (Paris: Seuil, 1993): at 944.Google Scholar
See Asad, T., ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press and Humanities, 1975); Hymes, D., “The Uses of Anthropology: Critical, Political, Personal,” in Hymes, D., ed., Reinventing Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1974): 379; Berreman, G.D., “Bringing It All Back Home: Malaise in Anthropology,” in Hymes, D., ed., Reinventing Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1974): 83–98.Google Scholar
See Farmer, P.E., The Uses of Haiti (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994); Hancock, G., The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989).Google Scholar
See Wallerstein, I., “The Insurmountable Contradictions of Liberalism: Human Rights and the Rights of Peoples in the Geoculture of the Modern World-System,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 46 (1995): 1161–78.Google Scholar
Quinn, T. et al., “Viral Load and Heterosexual Transmission of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1,” N. Engl. J. Med., 342 (2000): 921–29; Cohen, M.S., “Preventing Sexual Transmission of HIV—New Ideas from Sub-Saharan Africa,” N. Engl. J. Med., 342 (2000): 970–72; Angell, M., “Investigators’ Responsibilities for Human Subjects in Developing Countries,” N. Engl. J. Med., 342 (2000): 967–69; Greco, D., “The Ethics of Research in Developing Countries,” N. Engl. J. Med., 343 (2000): 362.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farmer, P.E., AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).Google Scholar
See Steiner, and Alston, , supra note 11, at 1110.Google Scholar
Harrison, L., “Voodoo Politics,” The Atlantic Monthly, 271, no. 6 (1993): 101–08.Google Scholar
Haitian proverb.Google Scholar
S. Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995): at 54.Google Scholar
Physicians for Human Rights, Health Care Held Hostage: Human Rights Violations and Violations of Medical Neutrality in Chiapas, Mexico (Boston: Physicians for Human Rights, 1999): at 4.Google Scholar
See Concannon, , supra note 18.Google Scholar
Danner, M., “The Truth of El Mozote,” The New Yorker (December 6, 1993): 50133, at 132. Danner quotes from the Truth Commission’s report, From Madness to Hope: The Twelve-Year War in El Salvador.Google Scholar
See Physicians for Human Rights, supra note 33, at 4.Google Scholar
Virchow, R.L.K., Die Einheitsrebungen in der Wissenschaftlichen Median (Berlin: Druck und Verlag von G. Reimer, 1849); Eisenberg, L., “Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow, Where Are You Now That We Need You?,” American Journal of Medicine, 77 (1984): 524–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, J. and Tarantola, D., “Responding to HIV/AIDS: A Historical Perspective,” Health and Human Rights, 2, no. 4, (1998): 58, at 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simonov, Ivan Nikitovich, Chief Inspector of Prisons (now with the Chief Board of Punishment Execution), Ministry of Internal Affairs, Russian Federation; interview by author (Farmer), Moscow, June 4, 1998.Google Scholar
Henkin, L., International Law: Politics, Values and Functions: General Course on Public International Law (Boston: M. Nijhoff Publishers, 1990): at 208.Google Scholar
See Schachter, O., International Law in Theory and Practice (Boston: M. Nijhoff Publishers, 1991): at 6.Google Scholar
See Neier, , supra note 12, at xiii.Google Scholar
See Steiner, and Alston, , supra note 11, at viii.Google Scholar
See Farmer, P.E., Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): at 18.Google Scholar
Neugebauer, R., “Research on Violence in Developing Countries: Benefits and Perils,” American Journal of Public Health, 89, no. 10 (1999): 1473–74, at 1474.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, J., “AIDS and Human Rights: Where Do We Go From Here?,” Health and Human Rights, 3, no. 1 (1998): 143–49, at 145–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroll, L. and Goldman, L., “The World’s Billionaires” (February 28, 2002), at <http://www.forbes.com/home/2002/02/28/billionaires.html>..>Google Scholar