Food and nutrition insecurity continues to pose a serious global challenge, reflecting government shortcomings in meeting international obligations to ensure the availability, accessibility, and quality of food and to ensure the highest attainable standard of health of their peoples. With global drivers like climate change, urbanization, greater armed conflict, and the globalization of unhealthy diet, particularly in under-resourced countries, food insecurity is rapidly becoming an even greater challenge for those living in poverty. International human rights law can serve a critical role in guiding governments that are struggling to protect the health of their populations, particularly among the most susceptible groups, in responding to food and nutrition insecurity. This article explores and advocates for a human rights approach to food and nutrition security, specifically identifying legal mechanisms to “domesticate” relevant international human rights standards through national policy. Recognizing nutrition security as a determinant of public health, this article recognizes the important links between the four main elements of food security (i.e., availability, stability, utilization, and access) and the normative attributes of the right to health and the right to food (i.e., availability, accessibility, affordability, and quality). In drawing from the evolution of international human rights instruments, official documents issued by international human rights treaty bodies, as well as past scholarship at the intersection of the right to health and right to food, this article interprets and articulates the intersectional rights-based obligations of national governments in the face of food and nutrition insecurity.

Where the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) seeks to accelerate progress toward a world safe and secure from public health emergencies, the realization of GHSA 'Action Packages' will require national governments to establish necessary legal frameworks to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease. By analyzing the scope and content of existing national legislation in each of the GHSA Action Packages, this comparative cross-national research has developed a framework that disaggregates the legal domains necessary to meet each Action Package target. Based upon these legal domains, this study developed an assessment tool that can identify specific attributes of national legislation. This article applies this tool to assess the legal environment in twenty Sub-Saharan African countries, examining the content of laws across the GHSA Action Packages, analyzing the legal domains necessary to implement each Action Package, and highlighting specific national laws that reflect attributes of each legal domain.

Food and nutrition insecurity continues to pose a serious global challenge, reflecting government shortcomings in meeting international obligations to ensure the availability, accessibility, and quality of food and to ensure the highest attainable standard of health of their peoples. With global drivers like climate change, urbanization, greater armed conflict, and the globalization of unhealthy diet, particularly in under-resourced countries, food insecurity is rapidly becoming an even greater challenge for those living in poverty. International human rights law can serve a critical role in guiding governments that are struggling to protect the health of their populations, particularly among the most susceptible groups, in responding to food and nutrition insecurity. This article explores and advocates for a human rights approach to food and nutrition security, specifically identifying legal mechanisms to "domesticate" relevant international human rights standards through national policy. Recognizing nutrition security as a determinant of public health, this article recognizes the important links between the four main elements of food security (i.e., availability, stability, utilization, and access) and the normative attributes of the right to health and the right to food (i.e., availability, accessibility, affordability, and quality). In drawing from the evolution of international human rights instruments, official documents issued by international human rights treaty bodies, as well as past scholarship at the intersection of the right to health and right to food, this article interprets and articulates the intersectional rights-based obligations of national governments in the face of food and nutrition insecurity.

In the absence of centralized human rights leadership in an increasingly fragmented global health policy landscape, regional health offices have stepped forward to advance the rights-based approach to health. Reviewing the efforts of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), this article explores the evolution of human rights in PAHO policy, assesses efforts to mainstream human rights in the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (PASB), and analyzes the future of the rights-based approach through regional health governance, providing lessons for other regional health offices and global health institutions. This article explores PAHO's 15-year effort to mainstream human rights through PASB technical units, national capacity-building, the Inter-American human rights system, and the PAHO Directing Council. Through documentary analysis of PAHO policies and semi-structured interviews with key PASB stakeholders, the authors analyze the understandings and actions of policymakers and technical officers in implementing human rights through PAHO governance. Analyzing the themes arising from this narrative, the authors examine the structural role of secretariat leadership, state support, legal expertise, and technical unit commitment in facilitating a rights-based approach to the health in the Americas. Human rights are increasingly framing PAHO efforts, and this analysis of the structures underlying PAHO's approach provides an understanding of the institutional determinants of the rights-based approach to health, highlighting generalizable themes for the mainstreaming of human rights through regional health governance. With this regional-level understanding of health governance, future national-level research can begin to understand the causal forces linking regional human rights work with national policy reforms and public health outcomes.

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