Medical legacies of the UDHR: How article 25 has limited obligations to realize the highest attainable standard of health

To enforce contemporary obligations to realize the human right to health, it is necessary to understand the origins of the right. This research employs legal and historical analysis to uncover the origins of international legal norms encompassing the right to health, examining the UDHR's article 25 proclamation that “[e]veryone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including . . . medical care and necessary social services.”

Evaluating the historically-contingent association between the right to health and underlying health discourses, this research finds that states drafted the right to health during an unrepresentative paradigm in public health theory. Rooted in the scientific spirit of the post-War era, health discourses veered away from social medicine and toward curative health care as states negotiated the UDHR. From this medicalized conception of health, the right to health was framed simply as a right to the individual medical treatments thought to be preeminently necessary for achieving the highest attainable standard of health.

These formative events in creating the right to health impact contemporary institutions for health rights, with the right to health's focus on medicine commodifying health in ways inimical to human dignity and excluding the systems required for the public's health. Despite normative evolution, this research concludes that the right to health—conceptually bound as an individual right to health care—is limited in advancing underlying social determinants of health through health systems, denying justice to those in greatest need.