Established under Section 25 of the HIV Prevention and Control Act of 2006, the HIV and AIDS Tribunal of Kenya is the only HIV-specific statutory body in the world with the mandate to adjudicate cases relating to violations of HIV-related human rights. Yet, very limited research has been done on this tribunal. Based on findings from a desk research and semi-structured interviews of key informants conducted in Kenya, this article analyses the composition, mandate, procedures, practice, and cases of the tribunal with the aim to appreciate its contribution to the advancement of human rights in the context of HIV. It concludes that, after a sluggish start, the HIV and AIDS Tribunal of Kenya is now keeping its promise to advance the human rights of people living with and affected by HIV in Kenya, notably through addressing barriers to access to justice, swift ruling, and purposeful application of the law. The article, however, highlights various challenges still affecting the tribunal and its effectiveness, and cautions about the replication of this model in other jurisdictions without a full appraisal.
Values, Policies and Rights
The authors note a proposal for the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide capacity-building for drafting health laws in Member States. They highlight that WHO has the authority and credibility to work with countries to make their national laws easier to access and understand, and to monitor and evaluate their implementation. WHO’s new technical support work related to universal health coverage (UHC) laws is observed as one example of its support for Member States in this important area. Strengthening countries’ legal and regulatory frameworks and engaging in universal health coverage-compliant law reforms has been missing from the universal health coverage agenda. WHO calls on Member States to align their health system policies with universal health coverage goals such as equity, efficiency, health service quality and financial risk protection. Strengthening health systems using health laws and legal frameworks is a pivotal means for attaining these goals and achieving sustainable results in health security and resilience.
A constitutional guarantee of access to essential medicines has been identified as an important indicator of government commitment to the progressive realisation of the right to the highest attainable standard of health. The objective of this study was to evaluate provisions on access to essential medicines in national constitutions, to identify comprehensive examples of constitutional text on medicines that can be used as a model for other countries, and to evaluate the evolution of constitutional medicines-related rights since 2008. Relevant articles were selected from an inventory of constitutional texts from WHO member states. References to states’ legal obligations under international human rights law were evaluated. Twenty-two constitutions worldwide now oblige governments to protect and/or to fulfil accessibility of, availability of, and/or quality of medicines. Since 2008, state responsibilities to fulfil access to essential medicines have expanded in five constitutions, been maintained in four constitutions, and have regressed in one constitution. Government commitments to essential medicines are an important foundation of health system equity and are included increasingly in state constitutions.
World Population Day in July 2016 was held with the theme “Investing in teenage girls”. “The teenage years are for some girls a time of exploration‚ learning and increasing autonomy. But for many others‚ it is a time of increasing vulnerability and exclusion from rights and opportunities‚ or just plain discrimination‚'” said Babatunde Osotimehin‚ UN under-secretary-general and executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). “When a teenage girl has the power‚ the means and the information to make her own decisions in life‚ she is more likely to overcome obstacles that stand between her and a healthy‚ productive future. This will benefit her‚ her family and her community.” According to the UN‚ 20 000 girls under the age of 18 give birth every day in developing countries. Siyabulela Mamkeli‚ Cape Town mayoral committee member for health‚ said good health and access to services were “crucial to help young women on the road to success”. In conjunction with other organisations‚ the city has been involved in pilot projects to provide girls who have started with their menstrual cycle with reusable sanitary towels. Meanwhile‚ the UNFPA's initiative - to end child marriages‚ curb adolescent pregnancy and encourage girls to make informed decisions about their futures - helped more than 11-million girls between the ages of 10 and 19 gain access to sexual and reproductive health services and information in 2015.
Governments in low- and middle-income countries are legitimising the implementation of universal health coverage (UHC), following a United Nation’s resolution on UHC in 2012 and its reinforcement in the sustainable development goals set in 2015. UHC will differ in each country depending on country contexts and needs, as well as demand and supply in health care. Therefore, fundamental issues such as objectives, users and cost–effectiveness of UHC have been raised by policy-makers and stakeholders. While priority-setting is done on a daily basis by health authorities – implicitly or explicitly – it has not been made clear how priority-setting for UHC should be conducted. The authors provide justification for explicit health priority-setting and guidance to countries on how to set priorities for UHC.
Two years after it was signed in August 2014, SATUCC reports that no Member State has ratified the SADC Employment and Labour Protocol as of June 2016. The SADC Employment & Labour Protocol was developed to serve as legal framework for the cooperation of SADC Member States on matters concerning employment and labour in line with Article 22 of the SADC Treaty which provides as follows: “Member States shall conclude protocols as may be necessary in each area of cooperation, which shall spell out the objectives and scope of, and institutional mechanisms for cooperation and integration”. This Protocol was then finally endorsed by nine Member States during the SADC Heads of States Summit held in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe in August of 2014. These are: DRC, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. However, for this Protocol to enter into force, it is required that at least 10 Member States representing two-thirds ratify it. Since then, no single Member State has ratified the Protocol. It is against this that the SADC Ministers of Labour and Social Partners during their meeting on 12th May 2016, directed the SADC Secretariat with support of the ILO to conduct a study to establish the problems and challenges underlying the non-ratification of the Protocol and further explore ways how to promote its ratification by Member States. SATUCC is conducting a regional campaign on the ratification and implementation of the SADC Employment and Labour Protocol.
In May 2016, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Ministers of Labour and Social Partners at their meeting in Gaborone, Botswana, considered and approved two regional policy frameworks pertaining to employment and labour as part of the milestones for the SADC Regional Decent Work Programme (2013-2019). These are: SADC Youth Employment Promotion Policy Framework and the Cross boarder Portability of Accrued Social Security Benefits Policy Framework. The SADC Youth Employment Promotion Policy Framework guides SADC Member States on a harmonised, integrated and coherent approach to realising decent, secure and sustainable employment and entrepreneurship for the youth in the SADC region. The SADC Cross boarder Portability of Accrued Social Security Benefits Policy Framework responds to the fact that non-citizens are quite often discriminated against when it comes to access to social security. Portability of social security benefits is limited because SADC countries do not have a common regional policy framework on the matter despite that a few countries had already concluded bilateral labour and social security agreements. The main aim of the SADC Cross boarder Portability of Accrued Social Security Benefits Policy Framework is thus to provide mechanisms to enable workers moving within the SADC region to keep the social security benefits which they might have acquired under the legislation of one Member State or to enjoy corresponding rights under the legislation of the other Member State.
This study determined whether laws and regulations in Botswana, South Africa and Zambia – three countries with a high tuberculosis and HIV infection burden – address elements of the World Health Organisation (WHO) policy on tuberculosis infection control. An online desk review of laws and regulations that address six selected elements of the WHO policy on tuberculosis infection control in the three countries was conducted in November 2015 using publicly available domestic legal databases. The six elements covered: (i) national policy and legal framework; (ii) health facility design, construction and use; (iii) tuberculosis disease surveillance among health workers; (iv) patients’ and health workers’ rights; (v) monitoring of infection control measures; and (vi) relevant research. The six elements were found to be adequately addressed in the three countries’ laws and regulations. In all three, tuberculosis case-reporting is required, as is tuberculosis surveillance among health workers. Each country’s legal and regulatory framework also addresses the need to respect individuals’ rights and privacy while safeguarding public health. These laws and regulations create a strong foundation for tuberculosis infection control. Although the legal and regulatory frameworks thoroughly address tuberculosis infection control, their dissemination, implementation and enforcement were not assessed, nor was their impact on public health. The authors argue that future research should assess the implementation and public health impact of these laws and regulations.
This study examines health’s evolving location in the first-phase of the next iteration of global development goal negotiation for the post-2015 era, through the synchronous perspectives of representatives of key multilateral and related organizations. As part of the Go4Health Project, in-depth interviews were conducted in mid-2013 with 57 professionals working on health and the post-2015 agenda within multilaterals and related agencies. Using discourse analysis, this article reports the results and analysis of a Universal Health Coverage (UHC) theme: contextualizing UHC’s positioning within the post-2015 agenda-setting process immediately after the Global Thematic Consultation on Health and High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda (High-Level Panel) released their post-2015 health and development goal aspirations in April and May 2013, respectively. Although more participants support the High-Level Panel’s May 2013 report’s proposal—‘Ensure Healthy Lives’—as the next umbrella health goal, they nevertheless still emphasize the need for UHC to achieve this and thus be incorporated as part of its trajectory. The final post-2015 SDG framework for UN General Assembly endorsement in September 2015 confirmed UHC’s continued distillation in negotiations, as UHC ultimately became one of a litany of targets within the proposed global health goal.
This paper provides a theoretical and political critique of how the concept of resilience has been applied to places. It is based upon three main points. First, the ecological concept of resilience is conservative when applied to social relations. Second, resilience is externally defined by state agencies and expert knowledge. Third, a concern with the resilience of places is misplaced in terms of spatial scale, since the processes which shape resilience operate primarily at the scale of capitalist social relations. The authors argue that resilience is fundamentally about how best to maintain the functioning of an existing system in the face of externally derived disturbance. Both the ontological nature of ‘the system’ and its normative desirability escape critical scrutiny. As a result, the existence of social divisions and inequalities tends to be glossed over when
resilience thinking is extended to society. Ecological models of resilience are thus argued to be fundamentally
anti-political, viewing adaptation to change in terms of decentralized actors, systems and relationships and failing to accommodate the critical role of the state and politics. In place of resilience, the authors offer the concept of resourcefulness as an alternative approach for community groups to foster.