Advancing Well Being: The Intersection of Health and Human Rights
It's there for the world to see. Carved into the walls at 651 Huntington Avenue in six different languages: "The highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being." Many people walk by these words every day, some so often that they have stopped noticing them, let alone thinking about what they mean.
Within the walls, however, a cadre of human rights and public health researchers do think about these words and how to make them a reality worldwide. These are the faculty and staff of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights.
The center is now in its sixth year and continues to be the only academic organization solely dedicated to research and promotion of health and human rights.
Stephen
Marks, who assumed directorship of the center last August, explained the
rationale for the combination of the fields of human rights and health.
Health, he said, is concerned with the physical, mental, and social well
being of people. Human rights also attempts to optimizing well being in
these areas.
The field of human rights provides experience in international affairs, international law, diplomacy, and politics. People in human rights, said Marks, "pride themselves on the precision and the rigor of the standards that they create for human rights, and the institutions in which they are set." However, the human rights field has not traditionally been strong in evaluating the effectiveness of the standards.
Program evaluation is, however, one of the hallmarks of public health. The marriage of health and human rights is powerful, he says, because it "draws upon the immense wealth of research methods in public health. Public health has created effective measures for determining impacts on populations--methods that help us to understand how human rights objectives can be achieved."
One of the areas in which the center has chosen to target its energies is in complex humanitarian emergencies (CHEs). These incidents provide an obvious example of how human rights and health issues intersect.
A CHE is defined as a crisis in life support and security that threatens a large civilian population with suffering and death and imposes severe constraints upon those who might offer help. CHEs are often caused by armed conflicts, such as the ongoing Kosovo and Chechnya situations in which the welfare of the population is threatened both by direct violence and by the conditions it encounters--disruption in medical care and unsanitary conditions--as it flees the violence. The plight of the refugees in Kosovo is an example and one in which the center is currently involved.
In Kosovo, human rights violations were the cause of refugees fleeing their homes and gathering into camps. Once gathered in the camps, living in unsanitary conditions and without established medical care, public health issues arose. Infectious diseases ran rampant. Simple medical problems became life threatening as outside medical assistance was blocked by the conflict.
The center's strengths on these issues are increased by the recent addition of Jennifer Leaning to the center's faculty. Leaning is editor-in-chief of Medicine and Global Survival, an international quarterly that addresses issues of war, disaster, human rights, and the environment from the perspective of medicine and public health. She also has field experience in problems of disaster response and human rights in the Mideast, former USSR, Somalia, Albania, and Kosovo.
The areas in which the center has been and continues to be most active are issues surrounding HIV and AIDS. In conjunction with the Harvard AIDS Institute and Merck Corporation Foundation, the center has launched the Enhancing Care Initiative, through which HSPH researchers work with teams of local experts in resource-poor developing countries to assess and revise policies to improve care for people living with HIV/AIDS.
Other HIV/AIDS-related projects include developing training modules for policymakers and service providers on the link between HIV/AIDS and human rights, designing strategies for incorporating human rights into international and national HIV/AIDS prevention and care efforts, and a range of teaching and technical assistance activities in the US and abroad.
A third area in which the center works is in human rights and sustainable human development. "Our goal here," said Marks, "is to work in developing countries on the conception and implementation of development policies in health-related areas that integrate a human rights approach."
The goal is to encourage countries to rethink their health policies as elements of guaranteeing human rights to their entire populations. "The human rights commitment of governments is the achievement of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health for the entire population. If a developing country is providing CAT-scans and dialysis machines for its elite, it may have produced something admirable from the point of view of health, but has failed to meet its human rights obligations to the entire population."
To undertake these ambitious projects, and others being considered, the center collaborates with faculty from throughout the school, notably from the Department of Population and International Health and from the Harvard AIDS Institute. Marks also plans to reinforce relationships with other human rights groups at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School.
Marks has been in the human rights field for three decades, having worked domestically and abroad, in the field and in academia. His most recent post has been at Columbia University where he directed the UN Studies Program and codirected the Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs concentration at the School of International and Public Affairs.
From all his experience, what he thinks is most impressive is "that all around the world, people are aspiring to similar opportunities of self-realization--everyone wants to live in dignity and wellness. Many have found in the human rights framework the articulation of their profoundest aspiration. It is through the realization of internationally recognized human rights that social change can occur on a global scale."
Through the FXB center, Marks and colleagues plan to help governments
and people understand those words carved into the walls of 651 Huntington.
They plan to show people how health and human rights interests intersect.
And through their efforts, they hope to contribute to physical, mental,
and social well being.
