As a means of enforcing the justiciability of the right to health, on 3 March 2011, Petition Number 16 of 2011 on cases of maternal mortality was filed in Uganda’s Constitutional Court by the Centre for Health, Human Rights and Development (CEHURD) and others. This case argued, among others, that by not providing essential health services and commodities for pregnant women and their new-borns, Government was violating fundamental human rights guaranteed in the Constitution, including the right to health, the right to life, and the rights of women. However, court dismissed the case on grounds that the the constitutional court had no power to determine the matter. CEHURD appealed to the Supreme Court asserting that the petition was fully with in the mandate of the constitutional court. The hearing could not however be started because the government was not represented in court at the first hearing of the Appeal leading to its postponement.
Values, Policies and Rights
This document presents the decisions and declarations of Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union 12 October 2013 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Following a week of intense negotiations, the Addis Ababa Declaration on Population and Development in Africa beyond 2014 was adopted on Friday, October 4, at the conclusion of the Ministerial Segment of the African Regional Conference on Population and Development. The declaration contains strong commitments by African States on sexual and reproductive health and rights. It calls for universal access to sexual and reproductive health information and services, with particular attention to the needs of adolescents, as well as emergency contraception, comprehensive sexuality education and critical services for survivors of violence against women and girls. It does not, however, call explicitly for the elimination of discrimination and violence in Africa based on sexual orientation and gender identity. At the press conference, the Task Force condemned the violence and discrimination endured by women and men in Africa based on their sexual orientation and gender identity.
This article reports Zambia's First Lady, Dr Christine Kaseba-Sata, calling for an end to discrimination against sexual minorities. Speaking at a UNAIDS hosted reception, she said that the "silence around issues of Men who have Sex with Men should be stopped and no one should be discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation. Rather, we should address reproductive health issues around this issue." She went further to assure people working in the sexual and reproductive health sector of her and the president's support.
SECTION27 hosted a Right to Food seminar on the 4th of November. This afforded the organisation and other stakeholders the opportunity to form a strategy to ensure the realisation of this critical but legislatively and judicially undefined right. The presentations given during the seminar can be accessed on the site. Attendees came from numerous organisations such as Action Aid, New Women’s Movement, COPAC, the Treatment Action Campaign, Foundation for Human Rights, Lawyers for Human Rights and Wits university.
This paper raises critical questions around the wide and growing enthusiasm for Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Typically defined as a health financing system based on pooling of funds to provide health coverage for a country’s entire population, it often takes the form of a ‘basic package’ of services made available through health insurance and provided by a growing private sector. Such programs are now zealously promoted by global health agencies, yet the evidence to support their implementation remains extremely thin. The paper argues that re-imagining public health care – rather than the private sellout of health systems via UHC – is the only way forward in building truly universal health outcomes.
Following consultation by the Joint Action and Learning Initiative on National and Global Responsibilities for Health on the FCGH in Geneva in May 2013, JALI and several partners who participated in the consultation developed a draft Framework for an FCGH. This is aimed at providing greater clarity on the principles and core content of the FCGH, building on the FCGH Manifesto. In the hopes of forging a broad consensus around this document, JALI is circulating the draft and calling for feedback on the Framework to improve it and ensure that it represents a shared vision. The Framework will then serve as a platform for a Campaign for an FCGH.
Much debate around the September 2013 meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on the post-2015 Development Agenda, has focused on the health and intersectoral development goals. Little of this debate has to do, however with how the “right to the highest attainable level of health” applies to non-nationals, who normally have no access to health care services, according to this editorial. The right to health obligates governments to facilitate access to health care to nationals and non-nationals alike, the authors argue. Ensuring that governments apply new development goals that include non-nationals is an issue of pressing concern in the post-2015 agenda. The denial of preventive and curative care to non-nationals is often linked to policies regulating cross-border movement. The global health community cannot afford to ignore the in-country inequalities that exist within the public health care systems.
Governments meeting at the UN General Assembly (GA) in September have heeded civil society demands for human rights to be at the core of the global commitments succeeding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015. The outcome document of the GA Special Event on the MDGs, held on 25 September, calls for a universal framework of goals applicable to all countries which promotes “human rights for all”. Once a lightning rod at UN development forums, human rights appear to have garnered consensus as a central foundation of development - at least on paper.
Universal health coverage “developed within the particular epidemiological, economic, socio-cultural, political and structural context of each country in accordance with the principle of national ownership”, as it is formulated in the 2012 UN General Assembly resolution, can, it is argued by the author, to possibly mean anything and everything. In low-income countries, it could mean something that looks a lot like selective primary health care, excluding antiretroviral treatment. For AIDS activists, universal health coverage could mean a giant step backwards. However the International HIV/AIDS Alliance came out with a statement in support of “universal health coverage. The words that matter are “rights-based approach”, as the author proposes that universal health coverage anchored in the right to health requires at least comprehensive primary health care, with duty-based international assistance to countries that are unable to provide comprehensive primary health care without assistance.