s.Four New Challenges, 20 Global Health and Human Rights in the Age of Populism

Author(s):  
Gostin Lawrence O ◽  
Constantin Andrés ◽  
Meier Benjamin Mason

This chapter examines the threat of populism to global health and human rights. Out of the ashes of World War II, institutions of global health and human rights have brought the world together in unprecedented cooperation, giving rise to the successes and opportunities detailed throughout this text. However, the current populist age threatens these successes and raises obstacles to future progress. In violent contrast with the shared goals of a globalizing world, populism seeks to retrench nations inward, with right-wing populist nationalism directly challenging institutions of global health, violating the rights of vulnerable populations, and spurring isolationism in international affairs. Such retrenchment could lead to a rejection of both global governance and human rights as a basis for global health. Yet, with hope for the future, there remains enduring strength in institutions of global health and human rights, with these institutional bulwarks capable of facing the challenges to come.

Author(s):  
Lawrence O. Gostin ◽  
Andrés Constantin ◽  
Benjamin Mason Meier

This chapter examines the threat of populism to global health and human rights. Out of the ashes of World War II, institutions of global health and human rights have brought the world together in unprecedented cooperation, giving rise to the successes and opportunities detailed throughout this text. However, the current populist age threatens these successes and raises obstacles to future progress. In violent contrast with the shared goals of a globalizing world, populism seeks to retrench nations inward, with right-wing populist nationalism directly challenging institutions of global health, violating the rights of vulnerable populations, and spurring isolationism in international affairs. Such retrenchment could lead to a rejection of both global governance and human rights as a basis for global health. Yet, with hope for the future, there remains enduring strength in institutions of global health and human rights, with these institutional bulwarks capable of facing the challenges to come.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Mason Meier ◽  
Lawrence O. Gostin

Out of the ashes of the Second World War, institutions of global health and human rights have brought the world together in unprecedented cooperation over the past seventy years, giving rise to the successes and opportunities detailed throughout this volume; however, the current populist age casts new doubts on many of these governance successes and raises debilitating obstacles to future progress. In challenging the shared goals of global governance in responding to a globalizing world, populism—abetted by the resurgent horrors of racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia—seeks to retrench nations inward, with rising nationalist movements directly threatening global institutions and spurring isolationism in international affairs. Such retrenchment could lead to a rejection of both global governance and human rights as a basis for health advancement in the years to come....


Author(s):  
Wu Chuang-Feng ◽  
Wu Chien-Huei

This chapter explores how to navigate health-related human rights in the trade and public health complex by tracing the intersection of international trade and public health and examining the role of international trade in global health law. An intrinsic tension exists between international trade, public health, and human rights in this globalizing world. Even though growing global interconnectedness has generated economic growth and information sharing, it is also characterized by threats—to access to medicine, commercialization of health care, and widening health inequality. Although this tension was well recognized in the development of the World Trade Organization, it has become much more complicated in recent decades. By addressing critical questions surrounding trade and public health, examining the transformation of risks into opportunities through global efforts, it will be possible to investigate possible venues to resolve trade and public health tensions in light of human rights.


Human rights are essential to global health, yet rising threats in an increasingly divided world are challenging the progressive evolution of health-related human rights. It is necessary to empower a new generation of scholars, advocates, and practitioners to sustain the global commitment to universal rights in public health. Looking to the next generation to face the struggles ahead, this book provides a detailed understanding of the evolving relationship between global health and human rights, laying a human rights foundation for the advancement of transformative health policies, programs, and practices. In bringing together leading academics in the field of health and human rights, this volume: (1) explains the norms and principles that define the field, (2) examines the methods and tools for implementing human rights to promote health, (3) applies essential human rights to leading public health threats, and (4) analyzes rising human rights challenges in a rapidly globalizing world. This foundational text shows why interdisciplinary scholarship and action are essential for health-related human rights, placing human rights at the center of public health and securing a future of global health with justice.


Author(s):  
Chuang-Feng Wu ◽  
Chien-Huei Wu

This chapter explores how to navigate health-related human rights in the trade and public health complex by tracing the intersection of international trade and public health and examining the role of international trade in global health law. An intrinsic tension exists between international trade, public health, and human rights in this globalizing world. Even though growing global interconnectedness has generated economic growth and information sharing, it is also characterized by threats—to access to medicine, commercialization of health care, and widening health inequality. Although this tension was well recognized in the development of the World Trade Organization, it has become much more complicated in recent decades. By addressing critical questions surrounding trade and public health, examining the transformation of risks into opportunities through global efforts, it will be possible to investigate possible venues to resolve trade and public health tensions in light of human rights.


Author(s):  
Lawrence O. Gostin ◽  
Benjamin Mason Meier

This chapter introduces the foundational importance of human rights for global health, providing a theoretical basis for the edited volume by laying out the role of human rights under international law as a normative basis for public health. By addressing public health harms as human rights violations, international law has offered global standards by which to frame government responsibilities and evaluate health practices, providing legal accountability in global health policy. The authors trace the historical foundations for understanding the development of human rights and the role of human rights in protecting and promoting health since the end of World War II and the birth of the United Nations. Examining the development of human rights under international law, the authors introduce the right to health as an encompassing right to health care and underlying determinants of health, exploring this right alongside other “health-related human rights.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-127
Author(s):  
John Harrington

By foregrounding a widened view of the rule of law in transnational legal processes, the works under discussion in this symposium can support innovative critical perspectives on global health law –a field that has gained wide attention due to the spread of COVID-19 around the world (Lander, 2020; Bhatt, 2020). Legal and socio-legal scholars in the decade and a half before the pandemic worked on locating global health law and articulating its underlying principles. Lawrence Gostin's 2014 monograph offers a synoptic view centred on international institutions (e.g. the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, UN Human Rights Council) and problems (e.g. infectious-disease response, tobacco control), along with an elaboration of its normative basis in universal moral principle and international human rights law (Gostin, 2014). Struggles over access to essential medicines and intellectual property in the early 2000s are, for example, represented in terms of the right to health constraining international trade law. Andreas Fischer-Lescano and Guenther Teubner's 2004 reading is oriented more by social theory than by doctrinal or ethical frames (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1006, 1008). A functional health regime has ‘differentiated out’, they observe, and operates as a discrete communication system across borders, albeit one that is threatened by the preponderant economic system. On this model, the battle for access to medicines amounts to ensuring, via human rights guarantees, that the rationality of the health system is not replaced by that of its economic rival in legal and policy communications (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1030, 1046).


Social Change ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-482
Author(s):  
Zoya Hasan

The recent spread of the delta variant of the COVID-19 pandemic in many countries, though uneven, has once again set alarm bells ringing throughout the world. Nearly two years have passed since the onset of this pandemic: vaccines have been developed and vaccination is underway, but the end of the campaign against the pandemic is nowhere in sight. This drive has merely attempted to adjust and readjust, with or without success, to the various fresh challenges that have kept emerging from time to time. The pandemic’s persistence and its handling by the governments both have had implications for citizens’/peoples’ rights as well as for the systems which were in place before the pandemic. In this symposium domain experts investigate, with a sharp focus on India, the interface between the COVID-19 pandemic and democracy, health, education and social sciences. These contributions are notable for their nuanced and insightful examination of the impact of the pandemic on crucial social development issues with special attention to the exacerbated plight of society’s marginalised sections. In India, as in several other countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected democracy. The health crisis came at a moment when India was already experiencing democratic backsliding. The pandemic came in handy in imposing greater restrictions on democratic rights, public discussion and political opposition. This note provides an analysis and commentary on how the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic impacted governance, at times undermining human rights and democratic processes, and posing a range of new challenges to democracy.


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