Health and Human Rights

Many individuals with disabilities utilize adult-sized changing tables to take care of their toileting needs with the help of a caregiver.1 These tables are not explicitly required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and no legal case in the United States has yet addressed whether the ADA requires public restrooms to have adult changing tables.2 This paper draws on an analysis of op-eds and news articles published in the United States to explore how individuals with disabilities and their caregivers access public restrooms that do not provide adult-sized changing tables...

This paper proposes that US human rights experts and abortion rights advocates challenge the striking down of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 by the majority of US Supreme Court justices because of the multiple human rights violations it has engendered. The paper has three parts. The first part summarizes the compelling response of the three dissenting Supreme Court justices to the majority ruling, which spells out those violations in detail. The second part offers a history of cases of violations of human rights related to abortion in other countries that have been heard and adjudicated by a range of human rights bodies in the last 20 years, and their outcomes...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Traditionally, teaching in psychiatry has had a passing focus on human rights. Against this backdrop, the aim of this study was to construct a theory of the learning value of a service user-led human rights-focused teaching program for final-year medical students. We used descriptive qualitative analysis based on constructivist grounded theory to examine final-year medical students' understandings of human rights following a formal teaching program. The overarching theory that emerged focuses on an awareness of the need for change within student learning...

Self-managed abortion holds particular promise for revolutionizing people's access to quality reproductive care in Africa, where the burden of abortion-related mortality is the highest globally and where abortion remains criminalized, in violation of various internationally and regionally recognized human rights. Increasingly safe and effective, self-managed medication abortion is still subject to many restrictions, including criminal laws, across the continent. Drawing on recent evidence and human rights developments around self-managed abortion, this paper explores whether and to what extent Africa's regional legal framework builds a normative basis for the decriminalization of self-managed abortion...

In introducing the Mental Health and Wellbeing Bill of 2022 into Parliament in Victoria, Australia, the state government claimed that the new legislation "delivers on the vision for rights-based mental health and wellbeing laws." This paper examines the new legislation in light of both local human rights legislation and international human rights law. Drawing primarily on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act of 2006, this paper argues that while the new legislation is not, in fact, rights based, it does represent some rights-related improvements over existing legislation...

This paper reflects on the right to health care from the Indigenous research paradigm. We analyze the case of an Aymara wise warmi (woman) who died after the Chilean health care system failed to provide culturally appropriate care. In the wake of her death, our cooperative launched an interdisciplinary and collaborative research project in an effort to file an administrative complaint against the family health center that treated her. We explore the events surrounding her treatment and death, as well as the institutional written response...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Global health equity is at a historically tenuous nexus complicated by economic inequality, climate change, mass migration, racialized violence, and global pandemics. Social medicine, collective health, and structural competency are interdisciplinary fields with their own histories and fragmentary implementation in health equity movements situated both locally and globally. In this paper, we review these three fields' historical backgrounds, theoretical underpinnings, and contemporary contributions to global health equity...

Given the persistence of health inequities in the United States, scholars and health professionals alike have turned to the social determinants of health (SDH) framework to understand the overlapping factors that produce and shape these inequities. However, there is scant empirical literature on how frontline health and social service workers perceive and apply the SDH framework, or related movements such as the right to health, in their daily practice. Our study seeks to bridge this gap by applying constructs from the sociological imagination and structural competency (an emerging paradigm in health professions' education) to understand the perspectives and experiences of social work case managers, community health workers, legal advocates, and mental health counselors at a maternal and child health center in a large US city...

The Araucanía region of Chile is characterized by a significant rural Indigenous population-the Mapuche people-who preserve their cultural beliefs about the world around them. This region is also distinguished by the conflict between the Mapuche people and the Chilean government. The Chilean state has supported the development of extractive projects such as industrial plantations, hydroelectric plants, and aquaculture, using nature to generate profits. This has collided with the Mapuche's inextricable relationship with nature and territory, which they value as a spiritual and historical space...

In 2014, the Indian state revised a key program providing aids and appliances to disabled people to also include cochlear implants for children living below the poverty line. The program is remarkable in its targeting of the poorest of the poor to provide them with expensive technology made by multinational corporations and its development of new surgery and rehabilitation infrastructures throughout India. Based on interviews and participant observation with key stakeholders, this paper argues that in focusing only on "a right to hearing" and on cochlear implants as a solution for deafness, health care practitioners ignore the complex work required to maintain cochlear implant infrastructures, as well as the advocacy work done by disability activists in India and internationally to transform existing political, economic, educational, and social structures...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Since 2011, the nongovernmental organization Compañeros En Salud, as Partners In Health is known in Mexico, has worked in collaboration with the Mexican Ministry of Health to strengthen the health care system in the Fraylesca and Sierra Mariscal regions of Chiapas, Mexico. In response to the high proportion of abandoned and understaffed clinics in the area, Compañeros En Salud has developed a program to entice medical students from some of the top medical schools in Mexico to spend their "social service year" in these facilities, where they receive financial support, on-site clinical mentoring, supplies, clinical support tools, and training in global health and social medicine using a structural competency framework...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Improving the protection of the right to health of ethnic Roma people is one of the most pressing public health challenges in contemporary Europe, as their life expectancy and health status remain significantly lower than their non-Roma counterparts.1 This paper analyzes Roma-led accountability initiatives that embrace social accountability and legal empowerment approaches to advocate for equitable fulfillment of the right to health. While these initiatives have led to the elimination of some harmful health practices (such as illegal cash bribes and violent and abusive treatment by medical professionals) and to improvements in health care, and some Roma communities have become driving forces for local and national health system reforms for advancing the fulfillment of health rights, the health inequalities affecting Roma communities remain significant...

Extended life expectancies and shifting dynamics in chronic disease have changed the landscape of public health interventions worldwide, with an increasing emphasis on chronic care. As a result, transition from pediatric to adult care for medically complex adolescents and young adults is a growing area of intervention. Transition medicine is a nascent field whose current emphasis is on middle- and high-income countries, and thus far its methods and discourse have reflected those origins. Through several case-based examples, this paper aims to highlight the possibilities of an analytic approach grounded in structural competency for transforming transition medicine through a human rights-based framework, with an emphasis on imagining a more global framework for transition medicine...

Food insecurity can be understood as a manifestation of health inequality and thus a deprivation of the right to health. This paper explores the strategies followed in primary health care centers in Spain to care for people struggling to regularly access healthy, safe, and sufficient food. Ethnographically based, our study analyzes, on the one hand, the resources available to primary health care teams to assess the social determinants of health and, on the other, the importance that professionals give to food in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases related to inequality...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

This paper examines the process of depoliticization of mental health in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) and links it to a critical analysis of post-traumatic stress disorder and the role of international humanitarian aid. It is based on a human rights framework that focuses on the right to health and that is instrumental in connecting human rights violations to demands of social justice. Efforts to weaken justice and reparations are analyzed by looking at the role of mental health professionals and assumptions of psychotherapy as a neutral and nonpolitical sphere...