Foundations of Global Health & Human Rights

Abstract

The foreword to Foundations of Global Health & Human Rights begins with Tedros Adanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) describing the importance of human rights for the achievement of public health. These words set the tone and succinctly articulate the underlying philosophy of the text. The book is not a lofty treatise musing on the principles and philosophy of global health and human rights – it aims to capture the immense impact human rights can have on the everyday lives and health of people all over the world. Within South Africa, there has always been a strong recognition of the right to health and a tradition of underscoring the importance of a human rights-based approach to public health. Yet even in this context, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic has raised new questions and challenges to the protection and realisation of the right to health in the context of a global public health emergency. Since December 2019, the field of public health has become mainstream and correspondingly, the awareness of the public health law and the integral relationship between health and human rights has gained greater traction among legal scholars. The fields of global health law and its domestic cousin, public health law, are not considered well-established in comparison to the centuries and millennia of tradition and scholarship behind our more established fields that form the core of an LLB curriculum. Yet, this field, which Lawrence Gostin first attempted to consolidate in his seminal work Global Health Law, has never been more important than now. With the need to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the significant role played by laws and human rights in responses everywhere, global health law texts which were previously been relegated to the niche audience are now integral to the work of many lawyers globally. With this increased readership, there is a need for foundational texts to cement global health law as a legitimate field within the discipline of legal scholarship. In this new world, and new normal, Foundations could not be a more timeous contribution to provide a roadmap of the global and public health law to legal scholars. In this ambitious text, editors Gostin and Meier, provide what will likely become a handbook for young and established global health law and public health law scholars alike. Divided into four parts, Foundations seeks to traverse key prongs of the relationship between global health and human rights – beginning with principled, scholarly discussions on the right to health but moving quickly onto a more comprehensive view of the field couched in practical application to the most significant global health challenges of the last five decades.