An evolution in health rights?: How health threats, theories and technologies have affected state obligations to realize the "highest attainable standard" of health

To give credence to national obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the human right to health, it is necessary that scholars, policymakers, and advocates understand the disparate underlying discourses that culminate in shifting the meaning of 'health' and the scope of the human right that upholds it.

This research employs legal and historical analysis to uncover the discourses that have led to changing legal norms encompassing the right to health, examining how such norms have evolved in international law since their proclamation in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and codification in the 1966 ICESCR as "the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard" of health. Evaluating the historically contingent association between legal norms of the right to health and health discourses of underlying medical and public health literatures, this research analyzes the processes that have led to the internationalization of health discourses in human rights law and the subsequent shifts in international health jurisprudence based on changes in these health discourses.

By analyzing the historical construction of health rights, this research concludes that the right to health has evolved over time and in relation to developments in health threats, theories, and technologies. Despite this evolution, however, this research finds that the progression of the right to health--intrinsically bound as an individual human right, with obligations enforced solely against individual nations--cannot address underlying societal determinants of health through international public health systems, a necessary public health imperative in combating global disease.