Bioethics and Human Rights in the Constitutional Formation of Global Health

Abstract

Global health" is an increasingly important area of research and practice, concerned with the profound implications of globalisation for individual and communal health (particularly in developing countries) and focused on achieving health equity for all people worldwide. As such, it is often viewed as overlapping with public health and, thus, conceptually distinct from the field of biomedicine and bioethics. Both fields bear an uneasy relationship with the field of human rights, which remains largely unexplored. The paper constructively utilises insight derived from theories of global legal pluralism and global constitutionalism to argue, perhaps controversially, that recent developments in international biomedical law and bioethics, constitute an important phase in the constitutional construction of a global health law system. In doing so, the paper analyses the role of human rights in the growing constitutional autonomy and organization of global health.

Three Different Currents of Thought to Conceive Justice: Legal, and Medical Ethics Reflections

“…On the contrary, legal positivism has stated that the law would in no way depend on the truth but on an act of regulatory will on the part of those who govern by relegating the space granted to morality to the extent to which the law is modeled on the principles universally accepted and enshrined in international declarations of human rights or on individuals [68].…”

The application of bioethics as legal basis in judicial sentences concerning right to health in Brazil

“…The right to health is an undeniable aspect of human existence that is inexorably intertwined with the concepts of life, dignity, and freedom (1)(2)(3). It encompasses an array of complex individual rights as well as social entitlements that facilitate access to essential services for preventing illness, promoting wellness, safeguarding against harm, and facilitating recovery from sickness (2,(4)(5)(6).…”

The constitutional economics of the World Health Organization

“…That the Organization was established with international consent only in 1946 but not earlier was telling.. Serious attempts to establish an international health organisation had been made since the late 19th and early 20th century with the creation of the International Sanitary Bureau (later renamed the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau) in Washington, DC in 1902; the Office international d'Hygiène publique (OIHP) in Paris in 1907; and the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) in Geneva in 1920, all of which operated independent of each other (Birn et al ., 2018). The WHO's moment came precisely when there was a significant shift and realignment of state preferences and perceptions of pressures and interests concerning human rights and public health (Krajewska, 2015: 783; Trachtman, 2008). With so many parts of the world in ruins, socio-economic infrastructure destroyed, tens of millions of people killed in the War, and many more lacking basic housing, food and medicine, the delegates of the International Health Conference felt a strong urge to embody the global sentiment that public health should be given extraordinarily high priority in the nascent UN system (Lee, 2009).…”