| Issue/Objective |
We are living in a frightening and turbulent times, with human rights, health equity, and international law under unprecedented attack. These threats undermine global peace, democracy, and development, and directly threaten the health, wellbeing, equity, and human rights of millions of people. At a time of wide-spread talk of a rupture in the rules-based international order, how can human rights and health equity evolve to face these challenges?
These challenges easily overshadow how transformative human rights have been. After WW2, human rights evolved into a sprawling global system of norms, laws, institutions and actors that in many places and for many peoples, have brought enormous and hard fought for benefits. Indeed, human rights have become so deeply entrenched as a basic language for justice that is hard to conceive of a world before or after human rights.
At the same time, health equity has become an increasingly core mandate and principle for public and global health, a paradigm frequently seen as closely aligned and synergistic with human rights given their shared concerns with fairness and justice in health and health care. Indeed, in public and global health, equity and rights have long offered important frames, principles, and tools to improve health outcomes and balance public health needs with competing political and economic interests. In this light, it is fascinating that in post-COVID-19 international law reforms around pandemic governance, equity has come strongly to the fore in ways that mirror the evolution of health equity within public and global health, at the same time that human rights have eroded in such instruments.
At a time when both human rights and health equity are under pressure and attack, what do these trends suggest about the future of these paradigms and about the possibility of a human rights approach to health equity and vice-versa?
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