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AJPH First Look, published online ahead of print Jun 2, 2005
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July 2005, Vol 95, No. 7 | American Journal of Public Health 1156-1161
© 2005 American Public Health Association
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2004.055111

CRITICAL CONCEPTS FOR REACHING POPULATIONS AT RISK

The Right to Health Under International Law and Its Relevance to the United States

Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH

The author is with the Harvard School of Public Health and is a human rights attorney who at the time of writing was working with nongovernmental organizations in Latin America.

Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Alicia Ely Yamin, Law and Public Health Program, Department of Health Policy and Management, 677 Huntington Ave., 4th floor, Boston, MA 02115 (e-mail: ayamin{at}hsph.harvard.edu).

In recent years, there have been considerable developments in international law with respect to the normative definition of the right to health, which includes both health care and healthy conditions. These norms offer a framework that shifts the analysis of issues such as disparities in treatment from questions of quality of care to matters of social justice.

Building on work in social epidemiology, a rights paradigm explicitly links health with laws, policies, and practices that sustain a functional democracy and focuses on accountability. In the United States, framing a well-documented problem such as health disparities as a "rights violation" attaches shame and blame to governmental neglect. Further, international law offers standards for evaluating governmental conduct as well as mechanisms for establishing some degree of accountability.






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