This article analyses the particular relevance of gender for debates about global health and the role for international human rights law in supporting improved health outcomes during public health emergencies. Looking specifically at the recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks, what we find particularly troubling in both cases is the paucity of engagement with human rights language and the diverse backgrounds of women in these locations of crisis, when women-specific advice was being issued.
Key populations, specifically people who sell sex (PWSS), people who inject drugs (PWID) and lesbian, and gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people experience significant human rights violations which underpin the continued high HIV incidence in these populations.This rapid assessment of human rights violations in Eastern and Southern Africa focuses on three priority key populations – PWSS, LGBTI (including MSM), and PWID. The report outlines the normative international treaties that establish a basis for a human rights framework for the HIV response, and explores the emerging evidence of how to promote and protect human rights of key populations and potential key entry points.
In its key findings, the report highlights that evidence from Eastern and Southern Africa suggests there is a large gap between state commitments to protection and promotion of human rights, as agreed to under numerous international and regional human rights treaties,
This article provides results from an online survey of humanitarian workers and volunteers that was conducted in May and June 2010. The purpose of the survey was to understand how the humanitarian aid system adopts or incorporates human rights into its post-natural disaster work and metrics. Data collected from Haiti suggest that humanitarians have embraced a rights-based approach but that they do not agree about how this is defined or about what standards and indicators can be considered rights-based. This disagreement may reveal that humanitarians are aware of a mismatch between the rights-based approach to post-disaster humanitarian work and the legal framework of human rights.
Using participation and accountability as examples, this article identifies and examines this mismatch and suggests that the humanitarian aid system should more fully embrace engagement with the human rights framework. To do so, the article concludes,
Like other mosquito-borne viruses, Zika thrives in areas with substandard sanitation and infrastructure—which are directly linked to state failures to ensure the basic human right to an adequate standard of living. Until recently, the Zika virus was thought to be relatively harmless, usually only causing mild symptoms.
But in October 2015, Brazil reported a concurrent increase in the number of babies born with unusually small heads, a condition known as microcephaly. Almost immediately, governments and public health officials began to ask women to delay their pregnancies, seemingly without considering the ethical or practical implications of such advice, and with hardly any effort to bolster sexual and reproductive health policies and services.
Ebola demonstrates the critical link between health and human rights, the lack of governance, and the misdirection that befalls the international community in addressing such outbreaks. Human rights experts agree that the Ebola response falls into Lawrence Gostin’s paradigm whereby “the perception persists that disease threats originate in the global South, requiring international law to prevent their spread to affluent regions.”
In the case of Ebola, it becomes painfully clear that such perceptions apply given that six months separated the Centers for Disease Control’s recognition of the outbreak in March and the call for international mobilization by President Obama in mid-September.