Promoting Global Accountability for Women's and Children's Health: The Challenges and Possibilities for a Framework Convention

The story of the relationship between the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the sexual and reproductive rights movement is a parable of politics, betrayals, regroupings, and, most fundamentally, the perpetual challenges to meaningfully empowering women through global initiatives. This presentation will describe some of this evolution to date, focusing on the role of the human rights movement in calling for greater accountability for women's and children's health, and in particular sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). It will also examine the resulting institutions and mechanisms that have been created at the international level to address failures of accountability for women's and children's health, and how ‘accountability' has come to be understood. It will review the connections between national level advocacy, including litigation, and international standard-setting through innovative work at the Human Rights Council, such as the 2012 adoption of the United Nations Technical Guidance on Human-Rights-based approaches to Maternal Mortality and Morbidity. It will also describe and evaluate the WHO Commission on Information and Accountability and the independent Expert Review Group, with an eye toward drawing lessons from these experiences and initiatives relating to global oversight and accountability through a Framework Convention on Global Health.