2018•Oxford University Press eBooksRequires access

Development of Human Rights through WHO

Benjamin Mason Meier, Florian Kastler

Abstract

With both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the World Health Organization (WHO) coming into existence in 1948, there was great postwar promise that these two institutions would complement each other, with WHO serving to support human rights in its health policies, programs, and practices. Yet WHO’s support for human rights would vary dramatically in the decades that followed: neglecting human rights law during crucial years in the development of health-related rights, implementing human rights as a foundation for its “Health for All” campaign, and operationalizing rights-based standards in the international response to HIV/AIDS. This chapter examines WHO’s evolving contributions to (and, in some cases, negligence of) the rights-based approach to health, with this history framing WHO’s enduring challenges in exercising its international legal authorities, collaborating with the United Nations human rights system, and mainstreaming human rights in the WHO Secretariat.

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Key concepts: Human rights, Right to health, International human rights law, Political science, Fundamental rights, Linguistic rights, Right to property, Framing (construction)