The right to health in the United Kingdom

Abstract

How far can a right to health be said to exist in the United Kingdom (UK)? The UK is a signatory to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and is a state party to the EU Social Charter, and to this extent there may be said to exist a commitment to the health-related rights expressed in those instruments. Furthermore, leading British scholars have emphasised the significance of rights (albeit not the right to health alone); the ‘fathers’ of medical law as an academic discipline in the UK argued that the field was a “subset of human rights law” ([1], 3), while a more recent analysis notes a “strong argument that the conceptual unity of medical law is human rights” ([2], 2). Yet, when we turn from what many might see as statements of aspiration or ‘mere’ academic opinion to the practical reality of delivery of healthcare in the UK, the place of the right to health becomes much less distinct. This is perhaps unsurprising when one considers a broader historical and socio-political context in which the relationship between the individual and the British state was traditionally regulated not through positive rights but rather through negative ‘civil liberties’; freedom and autonomy were, in essence, residual. In the case of healthcare, this manifested itself through an or­ ganisational approach post-World War II; the stateindividual nexus was understood not in terms of rights of access to treatments and services, but rather as a duty placed upon government