Online Program

339610
Human Rights Agreements: How Taking them Seriously Could Transform Population Health


Monday, November 2, 2015 : 11:30 a.m. - 11:50 a.m.

Jody Heymann, M.D., Ph.D., Fielding School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
Currently, monitoring and implementation of human rights agreements is inadequate.  New data availability, its broad global access through changing ICT, and global social networks could transform monitoring, transparency and accountability.  These same tools could make human rights instruments a powerful approach to markedly changing social determinants of health and health equity.  The session will examine in particular the relevance of the most widely signed human rights agreements to population health and agreements on social and economic rights including: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, New tools will be shared which are now becoming publicly available. These will include new maps of progress in 193 countries globally on issues ranging from labor to education, discrimination, poverty, and the environment which can be used by NGOs, as well as policy makers.  Longitudinal and cross-sectional data sets which include legal rights and policies in all UN countries merged onto harmonized household survey data for over 90 countries which can be used for multilevel modeling by researchers will also be presented.

Learning Areas:

Public health or related laws, regulations, standards, or guidelines
Public health or related public policy

Learning Objectives:
Identify new tools available for monitoring and accountability of human rights agreement Discuss new data resources which make it newly possible to better evaluate quantitatively what policy approaches are effective at addressing key social determinants of health and addressing key social and economic rights

Keyword(s): Human Rights, Policy/Policy Development

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am a researcher on health and social policy and the Dean of the Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.