The Global Call to Action against Poverty Africa (GCAP Africa) secretariat celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December. In partnership with the Every Human Has Rights campaign (EHHR) – spearheaded by the Elders, like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu – GCAP is calling for true reflection on the universality of these celebrated rights. It is calling on all humanity and even more so those in power to re-look their interactions and perceptions of those that are extremely marginalised and have absolutely no voice. Africans are well aware of the disparity in the application of all documents regarding human rights. The continued exodus of African people toward the West in search of ‘better lives’ is one clear manifestation of dissatisfaction in Africa.
Values, Policies and Rights
A resolution calling on the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to recognise human rights to access needed medicines was passed at a meeting of African human rights organisations in Abuja, Nigeria. The NGO forum was composed of about 100 human rights organisations in Africa with observer status before the African Commission. The resolution calls on the Commission to recognise access to needed medicines as a fundamental component of the right to health and clarify the state obligations in this regard. It specifically calls on the Commission to fulfil its duty to respect, protect and enforce rights to access to medicines. This includes taking full advantage of all flexibilities in the WTO Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) that promote access to affordable medicines.
In the past six years the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Human Rights Centre have prepared an impressive body of reports offering detailed analyses on elements of the right to health. They have developed a framework for analysis of health-related issues that had so far not been studied from a human rights perspective. A September 2008 symposium reviewed these themes and strategies and made suggestions for further research and implementation. The meeting covered health systems and the right to the highest attainable standard of health, mainstreaming a human rights-based approach to health and the Special Rapporteur’s missions and reports, such as those on community participation and HIV and AIDS.
Human rights provisions addressing technology have been much ignored but are starting to receive renewed interest, mainly regarding patent disputes, stagnation in publicly funded research, and the role of technology in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. This study analyses articles 11.2(a) and 15.1(b) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), as well as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, neither of which assume any conflict between technology and the environment. International cooperation for the realisation of the right to food is widely acknowledged, including technological efforts to produce more high-yielding varieties. Human rights treaties, especially in the ICESCR, can help guide the formulation and implementation of technology policies.
This initiative aims to reduce maternal mortality by holding governments accountable for implementing effective and equitable policies and programmes, securing increased resources at the global and national levels and promoting understanding among, and providing expertise to, key stakeholders on addressing maternal mortality as a human rights issue. It was founded by the AMDD program at Columbia University, CARE, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Family Care International, Physicians for Human Rights, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to the highest attainable standard of health, Paul Hunt. These diverse organisations with different perspectives have joined together to use human rights in the struggle against maternal mortality.
The recently released World Health Report on PHC (WHO Oct 2008) is an attempt to bring PHC again to the forefront of our priorities in global health. But to go beyond well-meaning pronouncements, this will clearly need some internal reorganisation in this UN agency. The question is whether its leadership plans such a re-orientation? PHM does not shy away from a political approach to PHC and is not really fighting its opponents; it is rather bringing the level of the discussion to a higher level. PHM challenges the concept that good health is an imperative for increased economic productivity. Instead, it insists that health is an inalienable human right. Health is not either a technical or a political issue – it is both – and pro-poor health interventions mean nothing if not concomitantly accompanied by poverty reduction actions that are pro-health.
Essential medicines must be physically accessible (available), economically accessible (affordable) and must be administered without discrimination. To help ensure this, the HIV Clinical Group at Pretoria University, in conjunction with PIJIP and WCL clinic students, is working to gather widespread NGO support for a submission before the African Commission during its meeting in Abuja, Nigeria from the 10th to the 24th of November. This submission will call upon the African Commission to adopt an interpretation of the right to health under the African Charter, which mirrors the one provided by General Comment 14 to the ICESCR, specifically recognising that access to medicines is a crucial component to the right to health. Furthermore, upon recognising that the right to health includes the components of accessibility, availability, acceptability, and good quality of medicines, the submission will call upon the African Commission, in the future, to use these standards as a means to uniformly monitor the state’s compliance with the right to health.
Adopted in 2005, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is the most recent framework on management of development aid assistance agreed by the donor community in the OECD, in partnership with some Southern governments. It aims to contribute to achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. There have been some improvements in recognising the importance of gender equality and women’s rights, such as the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), which emphasises their central place of poverty reduction and human rights in development policy. The AAA also recognises the need to improve access to sex-disaggregated data but fails to explicitly recognise the need for coherence with international agreements on human rights, gender equality, environmental sustainability and decent work as frameworks for aid relationships. Ultimately, there has been no significant change in direction since 2005.
This paper questions the right of corporations in developed countries to own biological samples of traditional medical knowledge in developing nations. This phenomenon has been referred to as biopiracy or as bioprospecting. Biopiracy is tackled in two international treaties - the Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). But these treaties have different goals: the CBD focuses on protecting biological diversity, while TRIPS promotes private ownership. This paper addresses friction about how to interpret international contracts with embedded biopiracy. It recommends collecting traditional knowledge on publicly accessible databases so that patent offices can determine the real source of knowledge. Patent applicants could also be required to disclose the source of biological material to prevent misappropriation of genetic material. Countries should also strike deals with corporations to obtain fair compensation for use of resources.
In the clinical situation it is difficult to know whether gender differences in management reflect physicians' gender bias or male and female patients' different needs or different ways of expressing their needs. To shed some light on these possibilities this study investigated to what extent it was possible to identify patients' sex when reading their blinded illness narratives, i.e., do male and female patients express themselves differently enough to be recognised as men and women without being categorised beforehand? Eighty-one authentic letters about being diseased by cancer were blinded regarding sex and read by 130 students of medicine and psychology. For each letter the participants were asked to give the author's sex and to explain their choice. The students' explanations for their choice of sex agreed with common gender stereotypes implying that such stereotypes correspond, at least on a group level, to differences in male and female patients' illness descriptions. However, it was also obvious that preconceptions about gender obstructed and biased the interpretations, a finding with implications for the understanding of gender bias in clinical practice.