The Highest Attainable Standard: Advancing a Collective Human Right to Public Health
Year: 2005
Type: preprint
Abstract: This Article advances a society-based collective right to public health that complements the individual human right to health. Viewing public health as a necessary precondition for fulfilling health rights in the modern age of globalization, a global public health framework may be realized through which states can join together under international human rights law to oppose global threats to the public’s, and each individual’s, health. Beginning with an acknowledgement of globalization’s challenges to disease prevention and health promotion, this Article attempts to frame the difficulties in addressing public health. After defining the scope of the individual human right to health, the authors argue that globalization has created new underlying determinants of health unaccounted for by this limited right. The authors find that inherent in an evolving human right to health is a collective right to public health, a right both recognized in jurisprudential discourse surrounding the right to health and justified as a collective right independent of, yet complementary to, the individual right to health. This Article concludes that a new framework is essential for health rights, one which explicitly acknowledges the public health interventions necessary to fulfill individual health needs. By laying out rights-based solutions to global health dilemmas, the authors advocate the use of international law in confronting disease, thereby allowing states to come together to solve collective harms under the mantle of a human right to public health.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Benjamin Mason Meier
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2258073835