Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Sofia Gruskin, JD, MIA, International Health and Human Rights Program., Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University, 651 Huntington Ave., 7th floor, Boston, MA 02115, 617-432-4315, sgruskin@hsph.harvard.edu

Human rights have only recently been recognized as essential to advancing health and development. Data are critical to these efforts both for the accountability generated through the use of human rights reporting mechanisms and to support evidence-informed, effective programming. Human rights provide an internationally accepted framework for state accountability, and enable systematic application of human rights principles to health policies and programs, including examination of laws and policies to ensure that they are supportive of health.

Within health and human rights work, data are used for two distinct purposes: to document and draw attention to health-related human rights violations, and to inform the development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of health policies and programs. Each of these purposes is explored with reference to specific examples.

First, the use of health data to assess state accountability is discussed with emphasis on its use by the United Nations human rights treaty monitoring mechanisms. Second, the extent to which rights are generally integrated into public health tools is discussed and a data collection tool for use by national-level health programmers is presented that identifies and addresses legal, policy and regulatory barriers through the application of a human rights framework.

These examples highlight two complementary approaches to the use of data in health and human rights work. Collecting reliable data linking health to human rights must be prioritised. Existing instruments can serve as models for the future but more efforts are needed which consciously consider both health and human rights in their design.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize approaches to data in health and human rights work
• identify approaches to accountability for health generated through the use of human rights reporting mechanisms
• Identify the use of rights to support evidence-informed, effective health programming.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation