Human rights and health – achieving the right balance

By Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. | April 24, 2015

There’s a very interesting viewpoint in this week’s Lancet on the positioning of human rights within the health component of international development. Authors John Tasioulas and Effy Vayena argue against two notions: first, that human rights should be the exclusive basis of global health policy, and second, the attempt to expand the interpretation of the right to health too broadly while ignoring the necessity of other rights for human flourishing:

“We cannot rely exclusively on human rights to develop global health policy; and to the extent that human rights are relevant, we cannot restrict ourselves to the right to health.”

The authors point out that the overly-broad concept of health is embedded in the preamble to the World Health Organization (WHO) Constitution, which defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity.” Rather than reduce wellbeing to health alone, they argue that:

“Other human rights are also very relevant, such as the rights to life, physical security, religious freedom, and privacy, among others, because these rights either also serve our interest in health, or they impose constraints on how that interest might be pursued, or both.”

That point becomes extremely important when discussing the abortion debate within the United Nations, as the WHO not only urges countries to promote abortion access to the detriment of women’s health by removing any safeguards or constraints around its provision, but also tramples over the rights to life and religious freedom in the process.

Tasioulas and Vayena also discuss how the full and free exercise of human rights is not always conducive to good health, and may even be detrimental to it, as in cases where people voluntarily engage in unhealthy activities like overeating or binge drinking.

“Human rights are about how we treat others, not how we treat ourselves […] [G]lobal health policy should be concerned with the reasons that people have to promote their own health, including their duties to do so, and not just with human rights.”

Discussion of human rights at the UN tend to focus on the obligations of “duty bearers” to safeguard the human rights of others, but very rarely mention the importance of personal responsibility for one’s own behavior, except inasmuch as it impacts others. This is particularly noticeable in the area of sexual behavior, where proponents of “sexual and reproductive health and rights” (SRHR) argue that one’s responsibilities extend no further than securing the consent of one’s partner(s), and that one is entitled to pursue one’s pleasure free of stigma, legal or social limitation, and a full array of services to eliminate diseases or unintended pregnancies along the way.

Furthermore, it’s no coincidence that SRHR proponents are also strongly in favor of increased human rights language in the documents outlining the development agenda – and that countries opposed to the “sexual rights” agenda are well aware of how the human rights language has been co-opted to advance it.

While not discussing this debate explicitly, the authors of the Lancet article do a good job of framing the issue in general terms. In discussing the outcome document of the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals issued last summer, they note that it “makes very sparing use of the phrase ‘human rights’.”

“Is this a major setback for the role of human rights in the development agenda, as some believe? Not necessarily. […] Nonetheless, the conspicuous paucity of explicit references to human rights in the outcome document should prompt us to consider whether common misconceptions, such as those criticized in this Viewpoint, have diluted the power and appeal of the language of human rights.”

If human rights language has lost some of its credibility, it might have something to do with the fact that its most vocal proponents at the UN think it means publicly-subsidized sexual libertinism without consequences, but somehow not life or religious liberty.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter