In 2006, statistics showed that there were about three million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the five Eastern provinces of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): The oriental Province, North Kivu, South Kivu, Maniema and Katanga. Lately, due to relative peace in the region, the number of IDPs dropped to around two million by 2013. While the number has decreased, however, this article highlights how the people still need assistance for their precarious vulnerability. The majority are elderly, children, women who were victims of sexual violence and teenage mothers affected with all sort of predicaments such famine, AIDS and other disabilities. MSF built a clinic in Bulengo to provide free health care to more than 40,000 people. MSF has conducted more than 25,000 consultations in this camp, mainly for diarrhea and respiratory infections. People are mainly sick due to poor living conditions accentuated by poor nourishment. The author argues that the UN and aid agencies should start planning longer-term assistance, and other governments should respond with the necessary funding. They should join their effort to support Doctors without Borders in providing the necessary services attached to their mandate such food, water supply, shelter distribution and hygienic installations.
Values, Policies and Rights
Getting sick represents a risk of falling into poverty for millions of people around the world. The cost of health care put millions of people in the position to choose between buying food, sending children to school or paying to get healthcare. Yet the author argues that this is not inevitable because solutions exist: Universal Health Coverage (UHC) makes it possible for people to access health care without sacrificing other basic needs.
The recent proliferation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and independent media across Africa is argued by the author to be an important positive development. They are said to play an essential role by investigating government policy, exposing corruption and human rights violations, advocating for the rights of minorities and vulner-able communities, and providing social services. However the continent’s leaders reject what they see as an imposition of ‘Western’ ideas of human rights. This policy briefing highlights the shift in human rights discourse among African leaders towards more anti-imperialist rhetoric and the placing of African traditions above human rights. It provides examples of how local civil society organisations (CSOs) are challenging this view in the face of increasing government attacks. CSOs are argued to be crucial to positive transformation and the universal protection and promotion of human rights, and the author proposes that more needs to be done to protect human rights and create an enabling environment for CSOs.
A problem peasant women face is invisibility in the feminist and women’s movements. A second problem is the weakness with which the food sovereignty concept has dealt with the challenges of feminism. Latin America has assumed the struggle for food sovereignty as an alternative to the neoliberal economic model. Food sovereignty is based on the conviction that each people has the right to make decisions about its own food systems: about its own eating habits; about its production, marketing, distribution, exchange, and sharing; and about keeping food and seeds in the public sphere. This interview report presents the views from a feminist point of view on how people make decisions, who decides how power is organised and how to turn food sovereignty into a tool to strengthen and empower peasant women.
The Open University and Southampton University, South African SAIIA FLACSO-Argentina and UNU-CRIS are currently involved in the Poverty Reduction and Regional Integration (PRARI) project, a two year project studying what regional institutional practices and methods of regional policy formation are conducive to the emergence of embedded pro-poor health strategies, and what can national, regional and international actors do to promote these, particularly in South America and Southern Africa.
The drive for Universal Health Coverage is currently very intense. Everybody seems to agree on this objective. However, the term is argued to be ambiguous term and in Latin America two different notions
are used. One refers to forms of health insurance, be they voluntary or compulsory and public or private, and in variable combinations. The other refers to a single public health system—ie, a unified tax-funded health system as an obligation of the state. The authors argue that it is critical to distinguish between these two notions and to set uniform criteria of analysis to compare their achievements. In this context, these are: population and medical coverage in their categories of universal or segmented access and use of service and possible barriers; origin and management of health funds; type of providers; health expenditure, public and private; distribution of costs and amount of out-of-pocket expenditure; impact on public health actions and health conditions; and equity, popular participation, and transparency. Taken together, these reveal the extent to which the right to health, a widely held social value, is attained. The authors analyse the largely pluralist health insurance in Latin America and argue that it does not grant the right to health, understood as equal access to the necessary services for equal need. By contrast with the intrinsic restrictions of universal health insurance, the problems of the single public health system are identified as operational. Where implemented in Latin America, while they have problems to resolve, these unified publicly funded systems are argued to be 'on their way to grant the right to health'.
Investment treaties should be reviewed to ensure that States have the right to make changes in their laws and policies to further human rights regardless of the impact of such changes on investors’ rights. This recommendation came from the Special Rapporteur on Right to Health, Mr. Anand Grover in his last report to the UN General Assembly (UNGA). The report notes that nearly 40 countries have already began renegotiation of international investment treaties. The Grover report calls for an international treaty to hold transnational corporations (TNCs) accountable for their violations on human rights. The report presents the current state of play with regard to the accountability of TNCs with regard to human rights violations. Two other sub-sections discuss the shortcomings of international investment treaties and the investor -state dispute settlement mechanism.
The UN General Assembly later this month will begin negotiations over the content of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015. The draft SDGs contain very few explicit references to human rights, and are conspicuously silent on their role as a universal normative framework for sustainable development. This article explores how human rights advocates should navigate these contentious issues over the coming year. Three key shifts in strategy are presented as necessary to turn the tables on the stale geo-political dynamics that threaten to undermine the SDGs as an endeavour that is truly transformative and human rights-centred. Firstly, human rights advocates need to underscore the extraterritorial obligations of wealthier states to respect and protect human rights beyond their borders, and to cooperate internationally in their fulfilment. Secondly, advocates must counter the corporate influence on the post-2015 process with a much stronger push for corporate accountability. Thirdly, the human rights community must build more effective platforms and alliances with development, social justice and environmental movements to amplify the human rights voice in these debates, avoiding the fragmentation and issue-specific silos that have characterized advocacy to date.
This paper proposes policy options based on ILO research and experiences that aim at universal coverage and equitable access to health care. The policy options discussed focus on ensuring the human rights to social security and health and on the rights-based approaches underpinning the need for equity and poverty alleviation. This paper also provides insights into aspects of implementation and related challenges. It includes an overview of ILO concepts, definitions and strategic approaches to achieving socially inclusive and sustainable progress and highlights recent global trends.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were ‘top-down’ goals formulated by policy elites drawing from targets within United Nations (UN) summits and conferences in the 1990s. Contemporary processes shaping the new post-2015 development agenda are more collaborative and participatory, markedly different to the pre-MDG era. This study examines what would the outcome be if a methodology similar to that used for the MDGs were applied to the formulation of the post-2015 development goals (Post-2015DGs), identifying those targets arising from UN summits and conferences since the declaration of the MDGs, and aggregating them into goals. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) list of major UN summits and conferences from 2001 to 2012 was utilised to examine targets. The DESA list was chosen due to the agency’s core mission to promote development for all. Targets meeting MDG criteria of clarity, conciseness and measurability were selected and clustered into broad goals based on processes outlined by Hulme and Vandemoortele. The Post-2015DGs that were identified were formatted into language congruent with the MDGs to assist in the comparative analysis, and then further compared to the 12 illustrative goals offered by the UN High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development (High-Level Panel) Agenda’s May 2013 report. Ten Post-2015DGs were identified. Six goals expressly overlapped with the current MDGs and four new goals were identified. Health featured prominently in the MDG agenda, and continues to feature strongly in four of the 10 Post-2015DGs. However the Post-2015DGs reposition health within umbrella agendas relating to women, children and the ageing. Six of the 10 Post-2015DGs incorporate the right to health agenda, emphasising both the standing and interconnection of the health agenda in DESA’s summits and conferences under review. Two Post-2015DGs have been extended into six separate goals by the High-Level Panel, and it is these goals that are clearly linked to sustainable development diaspora. This study exposes the evolving political agendas underplaying the current post-2015 process, as targets from DESA’s 22 major UN summits and conferences from 2001 to 2012 are not wholly mirrored in the HLP’s 12 goals.