New UN Document Promotes Controversial “Right” to Health

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. | October 9, 2008

     (NEW YORK – C-FAM)  A recently released document from the United Nation's (UN) top health and human rights agencies promotes a litigious approach to enforcing controversial new rights through a broad "right to health." The document re-interprets existing human rights treaties to assert that states are already obligated to provide rights such as "sexual and reproductive health services" for adolescent girls, rights for "intersex" children, non-discrimination on the basis of "sexual orientation." The document claims that in order to realize these rights nations should change national laws, restrict businesses, limit intellectual property rights, and generally contravene international trade arrangements. 
    
     Released jointly by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR), the document entitled "The Right to Health" is meant to "shed light on the right to health in international human rights law as it currently stands" and "elaborates upon States' obligations with respect to the right." The United States and European countries have repeatedly rejected a "right to health," arguing that, if taken seriously, such a right would entail mandatory government-provided universal health care for all citizens and non-citizens among other things.
  
     Instead, nations maintain that they are obligated to the right as it was negotiated and ratified by states party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), that is, the "right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health." And while the WHO-UNHCR document asserts nations are obligated to uphold the WHO definition of health, as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity," nations in fact deleted that phrase when negotiating the ICESCR and opted for a targeted right that would be realized "progressively" over time.

     In order to progressively realize the rights in the ICESCR, states agreed to take "steps" aimed at four specific goals; reducing the stillbirth rate, improving industrial hygiene, controlling epidemics, and creating conditions to ensure medical services for the sick. This new document, however, promotes numerous new "steps" to the right to health which were created by the committee that monitors the ICESCR: changing national laws, policies, budgets, and regulations to enact the many new rights enumerated in their "general comments." One of these "steps" is the requirement to liberalize abortion laws.

     In reality, the committee has no authority to interpret or enforce the treaty. Acting in their "personal capacity," committee members are unaccountable to member states and often come from special interest non-governmental organizations. Nonetheless, the document claims that the committee will be increasingly important in "holding states accountable" for rights. The reason is that nations began negotiating an "optional protocol" to the ICESCR in 2007. According to the document, "The adoption of such a protocol would offer an additional avenue for individuals to submit complaints related to the right to health," allowing UN special rapporteurs and committee members to intervene in sovereign states to solicit complaints and find states in "violation" of the treaty. 

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