Challenges and Possibilities for Innovative Praxis in Health and Human Rights: Reflections from Peru

Abstract

In the theoretical literature, and human has come to mean much more than either addressing the health effects of torture and other abuses or, alternatively, looking into the restrictions on civil liberties imposed by certain health policies.' Yet the continuously mounting data on the social and economic determinants of health and the impact inequality has on health point to the urgent need to find ways to translate this research into practical advocacy strategies that promote the right to health as an issue of social justice. Although a vibrant and growing group of academics has linked social factors with health, relatively little of this work has used the idiom of human rights or has been connected to the work of human rights activists in the field.2 Some examples of innovative praxis drawn from Peru suggest both challenges and possibilities for linking the two fields more systematically in a campaign for health as a basic component of social justice. The connection between economic, social, and cultural rights-such as the right to health, on the one hand, and civil and political rights, on the other-has for decades been painfully evident in Peru and in Latin America, in general, where dictatorships and, in some cases, nominal democracies imposed brutal repression to facilitate economic austerity programs.3 Peru is emerging from 10 years of extreme