Online Program

Oral

Health and human rights has become an independent academic field, finding broad importance and proving highly influential in national and global contexts. With the end of the Cold War and an expansion of the United Nations human rights system, there has been a dramatic increase in state ratifications of human rights treaties. Where once public health academics shunned scholarship on human rights, this expansive development of international human rights law has led to a burgeoning stream of analysis on the scope and content of human rights in global health. By signing international human rights treaties, states acknowledge their legal obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the rights of their peoples in public health practice. However, with treaty ratification alone showing a weak association with state practice, the ratification of international treaties by national governments is seen as only the first step in the effective realization of rights. To realize rights, states must implement human rights obligations for health through commitments under national policy, actions in government programming, and results for people’s lives. There arises an imperative to understand the national implementation of these international human rights obligations. This panel seeks to survey approaches to studying human rights implementation, examining qualitative and quantitative research efforts to analyze the impact of international treaty bodies, national judicial challenges, and civil society advocacy. Through comparisons across human rights research methods, it is possible understand the role of accountability mechanisms as a basis to assure national implementation efforts to realize human rights for public health.

Session Objectives: Describe the importance of human rights law to public health promotion. Evaluate the role of qualitative and quantitative research methods in studying human rights implementation.

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH) , Masters Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES)